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This week on Sinica, a live recording from New York on the eve of the 2023 NEXTChina Conference. Jeremy Goldkorn joins Kaiser as co-host, with guests Maria Repnikova of Georgia State University, who specializes in Chinese soft power in Africa and on Sino-Russian relations, and Eric Olander, co-founder of the China Global South Project and co-host of the excellent China Global South Podcast and China in Africa Podcast. This show is unedited to preserve the live feel!Recommendations:Jeremy: Empire podcastWilliam Dalrymple and Anita Anand, about how empires rise, fall, and shape the world around usMaria: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by Nathan ThrallEric: Eat Bitter, a documentary by Ningyi Sun, a filmmaker from China, and Pascale Appora Gnekindy, from the Central African RepublicKaiser:Wellness, an ambitious novel by Nathan Hill about a Gen X couple in Wicker Park, Chicago; and the NOVA documentary Inside China's Tech Boom, of which Kaiser is correspondent, narrator, and co-producer.

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This week on Sinica, we're running an interview with Jeffrey Bader from early last year. We learned on Monday morning that Jeff had died, and we dedicate this interview to his memory.___This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Jeff Bader, who served as senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council during the first years of the Obama presidency, until 2011. Now a senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institute, Jeff was deeply involved in U.S.-China affairs at the State Department from his first posting to Beijing back in 1981 continuously for the next 21 years, through 2002. He later served as U.S. ambassador to Namibia and was tapped to head Asian Affairs at the NSC after Obama took office. Jeff is the author of a fascinating book on Obama’s China policy, Obama and China’s Rise: An Insider’s Account of America’s Asia Strategy. In this conversation, he offers a candid critique of the Biden China policy to date.Note that this conversation was taped in mid-February — before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, and before the Department of Justice announced the end of the “China Initiative.”Note that this conversation was taped in mid-February — before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, and before the Department of Justice announced the end of the “China Initiative.”3:23 – How viewing China over 40 years of rapid development has shaped the way Jeff thinks about China8:54 – Jeff Bader’s critique of the Biden administration’s China policy19:40 – Is it important to have a China strategy?24:55 – Right-sizing China’s ambitions: Is Rush Doshi right?31:17 – Defining China’s legitimate interests38:31 – Has China already concluded that the U.S., irrespective of who is in power, seeks to thwart China’s rise?43:16 – How can China participate in the rules-based international order?47:52 – Is it still possible for Biden to change his tune on China?52:57 – How much room does Biden have politically? Can he exploit to electorate’s partisan divide on China?59:54 – What is the “low-hanging fruit” that Biden could pluck to signal a lowering of temperature?1:12:09 – Jeff Bader’s precepts for better understanding of — and better policy toward — ChinaRecommendationsJeff: Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, a book by Stephen Platt about the Taiping Civil War focusing on Hong Rengan.Kaiser: Re-recommending two previous guests’ recommendations: Iaian McGilchrists’s The Master and his Emissary recommended by Anthea Roberts; and Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asiaby Jurgen Osterhammel, recommended by Dan Wang.TRANSCRIPT:Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to The China Project’s daily Access newsletter to keep on top of all the latest news from China, from hundreds of different news sources, or check out all the original writing on our website at supchina.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays, and editorials, great explainers, and trackers, regular columns, and, of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region to the tectonic shifts underway, as China rolls out what we call the Red New Deal. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.It’s a rare thing that I read anything these days and find myself in emphatic agreement with every bit of it, the descriptive and prescriptive alike. But that’s how I felt about a recent piece for the Brookings website by Jeff Bader, a veteran diplomat, who was senior director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council during the first years of the Obama presidency until 2011. Ambassador Bader served as U.S. ambassador to Namibia and is now a senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings.But he was deeply involved in the U.S.-China relationship at the State Department from his first posting to Beijing back in 1981 for the next 21 years, really through 2002, before being tapped to head Asian Affairs at NSC after Obama took office. After leaving the Obama administration, he wrote a fascinating book on Obama’s China policy, Obama and China’s Rise: An Insider’s Account of America’s Asia Strategy. The Brookings piece in question was titled “Biden’s China policy needs to be more than just Trump lite.” And in the next hour, we’ll talk about that piece and much else. Ambassador Bader, Jeff, if I may, welcome to Sinica.Jeff Bader: Thank you, Kaiser. That’s fine, I prefer Jeff.Kaiser: So, Jeff, I want to focus today on U.S.-China policy and specifically on your critique of the Biden administration’s policy to date. But I should note that first there’s an excellent podcast interview with you that was actually conducted by James Green, another diplomat with a lot of China experience, who runs — ran, rather — the U.S.-China dialogue podcast that went from 2019 to 2020. Yours is a two-parter. In fact, it covers a lot of ground. I highly recommend that [interview to] listeners who are interested in Jeff Bader’s storied career, his relationship with Richard Holbrooke, his experiences in China in the 1980s, and the management of the Tiananmen crisis, the participation in the WTO accession negotiations at the turn of the millennium. And, of course, his decision to back the young Illinois senator rather than the former first lady, who everyone was sure was going to win the Democratic nomination. You should check that out. It’s fantastic. Wait until we have Jeff back on Sinica and we can really do a deep dive into his career.But I do want to point out that by coincidence, you and I actually, Jeff, we have in common the fact that our first stints in China were in the year 1981. I was just a teenager back then and only stayed for that one summer, while you were on your first extended posting to China for the State Department. How has seeing the extent of change in China and watching it unfold in person over these several decades, how has that shaped the way that you approach China, that you think about China?Jeff: Well, I was there from 1981 to 1983 as a political officer. I was responsible for China’s internal politics, which essentially was an impossible job in those days. There was no publicly available literature beyond the People’s Daily, which had its limitations in value. Talking to people was highly risky. People didn’t want to talk to you and if they did, they were taking a risk. So the job itself had, let’s say a low ceiling in what you could accomplish. The city itself was a pretty dreary, dismal place. My main recollections are of about 4 million people in identical blue suits, riding around on bicycles in the bicycle lanes every day down the Jiànguómén Wài 建国门外 Boulevard. And a handful of cars weaving their way through. There were no restaurants, no publicly available restaurants at all. I had every meal essentially in the Peking Hotel for two years, which is a fate I wouldn’t wish on anyone.So it was a dreary place, it was hard to understand. I remember Dèng Xiǎopíng 邓小平 saying that China planned to increase its GDP fourfold in the next, I think 20 years was his target. And that seemed impossible as one looked around at what was a state dominated, Stalinist society. You couldn’t travel anywhere. While I was there, there were about 27 cities that were opened up for travel without prior permission. And even there, you were tracked pretty closely. So when I came back from my first subsequent visit in 1987, when I was deputy director of China at State, in just four short years, I was astonished by the visual changes in the city, the dynamism, the neon lights, the restaurants, the variations in people’s dress, the opening of malls. You could see the direction China was going, it was going much, much faster than one could have imagined.Kaiser: It’s a bit like going from black and white to color suddenly.Jeff: Yeah, I came to Beijing from Taipei. I had been studying Chinese in Taipei. And Taipei was a modern Chinese city. It was like Hong Kong in those days. And so the shock of going from Taipei to Beijing was all the more stark because of the different levels of development and the different levels of dynamism.Kaiser: So how has that shaped the way you think now, just seeing the rapidity of change, the sort of compressed nature of China’s development experience?Jeff: Oh, in several respects. I mean, one is never underestimate the Chinese people. I mean, that’s my main conclusion. You had a population that had gone through 30 years of the People’s Republic of China and Maoism, essentially a totalitarian system. Before that, the civil war and occupation of the 1930s and ’40s. And before that, the chaos of the Republic of China and the Qing dynasty. And yet, in just a few short years, they were on their way to creating a modern society and it was readily apparent. So I never underestimate what Chinese people can accomplish. I mean, when I was there in 1981, 1983, my feeling was, from what I observed, that Chinese people only could accomplish great things when they were outside of China.Because of course we all know that overseas Chinese are dynamos in every country that they serve in. But that there was something about the Chinese system that made it impossible to have that kind of achievement at home. But I clearly was wrong on that. In three or four years, just tremendous achievements. I guess the second conclusion I draw from that is that many Chinese who were alive during that period and it’s 35, 40 years ago, remember the bad old days, remember what the life of poverty and grayness and being cut off from the outside world was like. And they have a sense of appreciation for what’s been accomplished and a sense of gratitude. Gratitude to the leadership for the changes that have been brought about. Now to the degree to which that extends to the younger generation is a whole ‘nother question. But for older people, the contrast between the China that they grew up in and the China today is very apparent.Kaiser: Absolutely. It really parallels my own experience because I took my second trip there in 1986, I was in college. And that experience, just seeing the trajectory really changed the trajectory of my own life. I decided I really needed to sort of take a front seat to watch this happening and decided there and then that I would be back and I would spend a lot of time watching what happened, what unfolded in China. Fantastic.Let’s get into your critique now, fast forwarding a couple of decades now to the Biden administration’s policy, as you laid it out in that piece for Brookings. The piece calls that policy Trump-lite, and I’ve heard people refer to it, quoting people even within the administration saying, “Trump, but with allies.” But to be fair, there are other points of departure besides the multilateral approach, right? Could you identify first where do you think credit is due? The ways in which Biden, Tony Blake, and Jake Sullivan, Kurt Campbell even, and the rest have actually moved away from Trump.Jeff: Well, what’s striking to me, Kaiser, is if I were writing a defense of the administration, which I was not, and do not intend to do, I could identify changes from the Trump administration. And I’ll mention a few of them. But what’s striking to me is that the administration does not do that. And that was one of the things that inspired me to write this piece. The administration emphasizes continuity. They emphasize, as you just said, that they are looking to compete, using allies and partners. If you ask a senior administration official, “how is your policy different from Trump’s?” And I’ve heard many of them answer this question. The answer is invariably what you just said, “Oh, we do it with partners. We’re not doing it unilaterally.”So to me that suggests a certain bashfulness or a certain shyness about embracing any change from the Trump policy. They are, I think, looking over their shoulder at the Republican party, at their right wing and are deathly afraid of being seen as having departed from a ‘tough on China policy’, getting directly to your question, what are the actual differences? There are a few. For example, the climate change bilateral agreement that John Kerry signed with his counterpart, Xiě Zhènhuá 解振华 at the Glasgow summit. I mean, the Trump administration didn’t believe in climate change, no less in cooperating with the Chinese on the subject. So that was one big example. I think that the most fundamental difference is on the issue of regime change. I think that the Trump administration tiptoed up to the line of calling for regime change in China.If you look at the series of speeches that were given by Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and other senior Trump administration officials, they had a whole slew of them. They all left the impression that living with China, under communist part of the leadership was impossible. That in the Chinese communist party DNA, that they’re not only thieves and predators, but they had the nerves to dominate internationally and that they could not coexist with the United States in a manner that serves our national interest, unless their regime were toppled. That’s the way I read their speeches and I think that’s a fair reading of them. This administration, I think, clearly he does not believe that. They won’t say they don’t believe it, but their speeches aren’t filled with the same kind of vocabulary that calls into question the legitimacy of the Chinese regime.They seem to accept that. I think that those are the principle differences so far. I think that this administration also is a little bit more cautious on the subject of Taiwan. Its actions have been kind of all over the place, but I felt that the Trump administration, towards the end, were in the process of basically tearing up the rule book. They essentially threw out the policy on contact with Taiwan officials. They had scheduled a visit by the U.S. ambassadors, the United Nations to Taiwan, which was would’ve been an event revelant with symbolism, if not absolute recognition of Taiwan as a sovereign state in the international community. So this administration has been more assertive in talking about a one China policy. And although there’s some missteps, I think they do believe in it.Kaiser: So I’m going to want to ask you about the extent to which Biden finds himself constrained, looking over his shoulder onto his right wing, as you said. And I will ask you about what space there is for him. And you’ve addressed quite a bit of that in your posting for Brookings. But before we do that, let me give you an opportunity to simply lay out what you think is missing or misguided in terms of the Biden administration’s approach to China. What is the heart of your critique?Jeff: I think that Secretary Blinken’s formulation of a relationship with China that is largely competitive, that is collaborative when possible and adversarial when it must be, is not a bad formulation. I think that those three aspects of a modern U.S.-China relationship are realities. You can accept that framework and still wonder about the administration’s approach to implementation of it. If your approach is one in which, first of all, you’ll notice they never use the word cooperate. They use collaborate in that instance. And most of the time, since then they talk about interests being aligned. It’s as if it’s a, I don’t know, it’s the C word. It’s a word they’re not willing to use, as if they think that talking about cooperating with China, leaves them open to the charge of being soft on China, which is quite amazing to me.I mean, the thought that we can’t cooperate with another major power on issues like combating the current or the next pandemic, which there’s a decent chance it will come from Asia, since the last two did. Cooperating with China on climate change, which this administration has identified as an existential challenge. And where China and the United States are the two chief emitters of greenhouse gases. Cooperation on non-proliferation, which essentially means North Korea and Iran, where we’ve cooperated in the past. Our interests aren’t wholly aligned, but there’s a significant area of overlap, and we’re not going to solve those problems without working with China.I think that one can reapportion those three buckets in a different way than they have. If you look at the comments that senior leaders in the administration make, they are invariably all about competition, severe competition, extreme competition, strategic competition, never about cooperation, never about common interests. I think that they need to think much longer and harder than they have about economic issues, and particularly about the issue of decoupling. They’ve said almost nothing on the subject. They’ve just sort of trundled along with individual agencies, adding Chinese companies to the entity list, which forbids them to interact with American companies, with maintaining the tariffs inherited from the Trump administration, 20, 25% on Chinese products with a substantial cost for American companies and American consumers.And if you listen to administration officials, they will acknowledge, they don’t have a trade policy. They don’t have a trade policy towards China. They don’t have a trade policy towards Asia. They don’t have a trade policy globally. And what Asians care most about in their relationship with the U.S., frankly, is economic and trade issues. I mean, security issues matter to them, but if you don’t have an economic and trade policy, you’re not an actor in Asia. I mean, all the countries in Asia have intensive economic relationships with China. In almost all cases, China is their number one trading partner. In many cases, it’s becoming a leading investor.And if all we can do is carp about the spread of Chinese influence and not offer anything of our own, then it’s no surprise that the objective of making friends and influencing people among partners and allies is going to have a very low ceiling. I mean, take one example, this isn’t in Asia, but the recent switch of Nicaragua from recognizing Taiwan to recognizing the PRC. This seemed to shock the administration. The State Department put out a statement saying that Nicaragua had excluded itself from democratic nations of the western hemisphere by doing so. Actually, not only just the United States, but virtually every country in Latin America recognizes the PRC. But just leave that aside for a moment.Leave aside the hypocrisy of the statement. Why should we be surprised? The PRC is waving lots of money at Nicaragua for development projects, as they are with all recipients of the Belt and Road Initiative. They are ready, willing, and able to provide infrastructure projects. Whereas, the United States has imposed a series of sanctions on Nicaragua because the Ortega regime is undemocratic, authoritarian, and frankly, a terrible regime, okay? So there, there are reasons for imposing sanctions and I accept those. But don’t be surprised if a country, when it’s given the choice between someone who’s imposing sanctions every chance they have and someone who’s waving a lot of money at them, make a choice that is contrary to what we’re seeking.Kaiser: Indeed, indeed. To your point about what we are bringing to the table when it comes to Asia, Evan Feigenbaum had a very clever turn of phrase. He said that, “Oh yes, we are bringing security, right? But that makes us sort of the Hessians of Asia. All we’re doing is just sort of being mercenary soldiers.” In my day-to-day work, I hear a lot of people complain that the Biden team doesn’t have a real China strategy or variations on what one heard during Trump, like the administration doesn’t have China strategy as a China attitude. Is it though, an unalloyed good to have an explicit strategy? And if so, is it wise to talk about it explicitly and publicly?Jeff: Kaiser, I think you’ve got to have a strategy. Day-to-day, the strategy does not drive every single decision, a tremendous number of decisions you make are tactical decisions. But they’ve got to be within a broad framework. Now, administrations always pride themselves on putting out national security strategies and Indo-Pacific strategies. And if not China strategies, then at least China military reports. To be candid, these reports, a lot of effort goes into them, a lot of clearances, a lot of actors and different agencies. And then they go into the safe and they are referred to only when someone writes a speech.If you’re in a principal’s meeting of the National Security Council, the thought that someone would pull out a national security strategy paper or a China strategy paper and say, “But aha, here the strategy paper says such and such, we’ve got to do that.” That doesn’t happen. But it does condition the way everyone in the administration, different agencies thinks about China. And so if you don’t have a general strategy, you have different agencies running off in different directions, doing different things, which conflict with each other. I think back to probably the best national security advisor we ever had was Brent Scowcroft. He was very clear with other agencies about what the objectives were on China.It was the White House that was very clear about what they wanted done. And agencies essentially fell in line, whether it was because of a document or because of a general effective coordination, which didn’t really require a document, although one can argue about that. But I think you need to have some kind of a framework. And I mean, I tried to spell out some of the elements of the framework in my paper, talking about seeking a limit to decoupling, the understanding the decoupling comes at a great cost. Trying to narrow the areas of decoupling to those who are vital to U.S. interests rather than making it a reflex. Talking about the recognition of China as a major power with its own legitimate interests in which it’s highly unlikely there’s going to be a winner and loser in sporting sense in international affairs going forward.The chances are in 20 years, in 30 years, in 40 years, we’re still going to be dealing with an international system in which the United States, and China, and quite a few other countries are major actors. So we need to think about how we’re going to compete with China, but also live with China and coexist and cooperate with China. I think we need to think much more and be more vocal about people-to-people ties. That’s a phrase that generally gets short shrift among serious strategists. They think, “Oh, people-to-people, that’s for tourists.” People-to-people is at the core of U.S.-China relations. The U.S. technology revolution of the last 20 years in Silicon Valley wouldn’t exist without Asians of which Chinese are a large part.All you have to do is go onto any campus in the United States, in the engineering school, in the mathematics, science, technology department and look at a number of Asians and look at number of Chinese who are making major contributions to American innovation in those institutions. And the thought that we can descend into a hostile relationship with China and expect that they’ll continue to be an open spigot of top quality educated Chinese coming to the United States and being the backbone of most disciplines, either at some point, the Chinese party state will crack down on it because of the level of hostility or ordinary Chinese will decide they don’t want to come here anymore.It’s just not worth it. It’s a country that disrespects them. And then they’re all reading about anti-Asian violence in the United States and about attitudes in the United States. And they’ll either stay at home or they’ll go somewhere else. There are other countries that would love to have them and that will be our loss. That’s an area where I’m frankly, baffled that the administration has not been more vocal and more forthcoming, particularly given the level as a practical political matter, the Asian American support for the Democratic Party in recent elections. They’re aware of that in this administration. And that isn’t something that can be taken for granted.Kaiser: Yeah. Your words, Jeff, truly warm my heart. I mean, I’m in such profound agreement with you, everything that you’ve just said. It seems to me that there are some unavoidable assumptions that underlie and you might even say practically define one’s approach to China. And these are always questions that I like to put to people in conversations like this. First is, what do you reckon China’s ambitions to be? Because if you think China is hellbent on displacing the U.S. as the global hegemon, you’re going to come to very different conclusions about what we need to do than if you assume China only seeks primacy regionally and doesn’t desire the whole enchilada.So let’s start with that one. I mean, because these days it looks like, I mean, what I keep hearing is that while that strategy document isn’t even tucked into a safe, there is a book that people do come out with at the principles meetings, and that is Rush Doshi’s The Long Game. And apparently it’s now required reading on the Biden-China team. It seems to be sort of regarded as gospel when it comes to the question of Chinese intentions. Do you get that sense? And what do you personally see China’s scope of ambitions to be?Jeff: Well, I think Rush wrote a good book. Rush is a fine fellow. He did great research, it’s well documented. I think that Rush’s three stages of Chinese development, building, blunting, and displacement as I recall. Building China to compete with U.S., blunting U.S. aggression, and displacing the U.S. as a global leader is how he conceives of it. I think the building is about right, the blunting is about right. And the displacement is made up. It’s a guess, okay? His guess could be right. His guess could be wrong. But the evidence for it is, let’s say is lacking. I don’t see, in China’s behavior, something that suggests the ability to become the hegemon to use the popular IRR phrasing of a global system.They have no allies in the world. If you get past Pakistan and question marks about Cambodia. Chinese soft power is basically economic-commercial. There is not global admiration for the Chinese system of governance. Among Chinese speaking peoples in Asia, Taiwan, and Singapore there’s no admiration for it and no desire to emulate it, no less elsewhere. I don’t see China as effectively having the ability to pursue a global ideological agenda of spreading its system beyond its borders. There’s a lot of discussion about the degree to which China wants to explore this model. Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 said some things in various addresses to Party congress’s and plenums about the utility of aspects of Chinese governance that other countries might find valuable.That’s a long way from Stalin did in 1945 to 1953, where he basically imposed communist systems upon all of Eastern Europe and then attempted to do it elsewhere. And what China has been doing is, it has been exporting some of its systems of surveillance, which I think authoritarian countries find valuable. And frankly, so do some democratic countries, for law enforcement purposes. But that isn’t driving countries into making ideological choices about the kind of governance system they’re going to have. Those are driven by internal dynamics. And I don’t see Chinese missionary efforts to affect that. The Chinese, I think, are equal opportunity traders.Their relationship with Europe, with countries in Latin America and Asia is not related to regime type. And in the rule system, generally, if you look at all the international institutions that have been built up since 1945, China has not been the dominant rule maker in any of them. At least until the last few years, the rules have been basically written by the U.S. and allies. Now it’s another question about the degree to which China should be brought in as rule maker and I hope we can talk about that a bit. But they have not played that role historically in the thought that China is going to show up in the WTO, or WHO, or the UN, or any of these other organizations and suddenly going to attract a vast following in rewriting charters and objectives, I think is fanciful. So I think like great powers generally throughout history, their objective is to maximize their influence.Now historically, that’s mainly been Asia-Pacific region, the area of greatest concern and interest to them from a security point of view and also from an economic point of view. But clearly their ambitions for influence and for interaction do go beyond Asia. And I regard that as normal. I don’t see that there is anything exclusive about the U.S. relationship with, let’s say Saudi Arabia and the Chinese relationship with Saudi Arabia. The relationships may be competitive to a degree, but the thought that China is one day going to be the dominant actor in these relationships around the world, I find very unlikely. And I think that they have a realistic sense of their own limitations and they are not expecting or anticipating doing that. They do want to expand influence, but China’s got enough problems at home so that a hell-bent effort on becoming a global hegemon in the face of the major challenges of home, which are going to determine the future of their governance and the future of their society, that seems to me an unlikely choice.Kaiser: Yeah. Again, in full agreement with you. A second question, and I do want to get to talk about China’s role in the so-called rules-based international order and whether it will become more of a rule maker rather than a rule taker. But there is a second sort of foundational question, and that is what are China’s legitimate interests? Where should the United States draw the line? What is out of bounds and what is in bounds? Because it seems to me any form of coexistence involves a recognition of those interests from both sides. And that is going to involve a compromise and departure, certainly, from where we are right now.Jeff: Great question, Kaiser. I say legitimate interests, certainly one obviously is their economic commercial relationships with other countries in the world. Those are a legitimate interest of China. The United States should accept the reality and we frankly have no choice but to accept the reality that China’s going to be a big actor in its economic and commercial relationships around the world. And we should not be wasting our time with speeches the way the Trump administration did, denouncing the Belt and Road Initiative and denouncing China’s predatory economic behavior here and there as imperialists thinking that countries in the world will somehow, the scales will fall from their eyes and they will suddenly see the light. And they’ll say, “Oh, we’re not interested in trade and investment ties with China anymore.” It’s a nonsensical approach and we may as well accept the reality, okay? That’s one.Second, we need to understand that China is going to be a great power, if it isn’t already. And I would say it probably is already. And being a great power means a military that matches its national security needs. Now, I think we need to watch to see do they develop a military capability that is purely based upon the wishes of projection of great powers. That is, “Gee, we are a great power and therefore, we need to have a military commensurate with our great power status, so that we can act around the world as a great power.” I don’t think that that’s a standard that they should seek or that we should accept. I think that China’s legitimate military interests are those consistent with a reasonable national security strategy for China rather than be a global military competitor. I think the third is the right of China to have its own political, economic, and social system.Clearly the Chinese have a fear of so-called color revolutions that we’ve seen in the 20 years, where states in Central Asia, the Middle East have been subject to internal pressures that have attempted to convert them from autocracies into more democratic systems. The Chinese have tended to attribute that to American pressure. I think wrongly, these generally come from domestic reasons. But one can’t control perceptions. The Chinese perceive that we are a threat to the stability and the sanctity of their system. And certainly, there’s enough evidence in American political speeches for them to believe that. And I said, during the Trump administration, it would’ve been a logical conclusion, frankly. I think that whatever we may think of the communist system and whatever wishes we may have for China to develop a more participatory pluralistic and democratic system. And that’s not something I strongly believe in, I imagine you do, and all of us in the United States do.Kaiser: Yes.Jeff: We need, at the same time, to recognize that these decisions are not going to be made by you and me or by anyone in the United States. They never are. And when we attempt to make them, we both frustrate ourselves and we create turmoil that we may be able to affect outcomes, but not in the way we want. There are unforeseen consequences from what we do, when we try to destabilize countries. We should accept that China is going to determine its own future, while without the wisdom or the guidance of the United States. And finally, and this one I think is complicated. China’s territorial claims, which means at this point, primarily Taiwan, somewhat the South China Sea and the East China Sea. I think we need to acknowledge them. We need to show respect for them. And let me define the word respect for the moment. But we do not need to accept them.And then these verbs are hard to parse for Americans who like straight talk. We established relations with China on the basis of acknowledging the Chinese position, that Taiwan was a part of China. We didn’t accept the Chinese position that Taiwan is a part of China. And by acknowledging it, what we were saying was, “We are not going to be frontal in challenging your claim. Your claim is your claim and we are not denying your claim. We are not asserting the validity of your claim, at the same time. We are basically recognizing it is an extremely sensitive issue for China because of history that these areas are all areas that historically were claimed by China and the Chinese nationalism is not going to quietly surrender these claims.”So we need to respect them in the sense that we need to understand they come out of Chinese history and that they are supported, overwhelmingly, by the people of China. But at the same time, we do not endorse or accept them in the sense that we do not think that PRC rule should be imposed upon Taiwan until and unless there is a voluntary, uncoerced agreement between Taiwan and Beijing, so it’s a recognition. The Chinese use the term core interests. That was a term that we didn’t much like. I don’t think that we should be using it, but we should understand that these are the most sensitive national issues for China, which means a high degree of care in the way we handle these issues.Kaiser: Thank you for that very thoughtful answer. Implicit in that is the answer to another question, which is really about what American national interests are and whether we are able to accept a genuinely multi-polar world. I think that we sort of pay lip service to the idea, but we don’t really change our behavior and continue to behave in ways that has Beijing concluding something. This is what really keeps me up at night and has me worried. I am genuinely afraid that Beijing has concluded or is close to concluding at this point, and by that I mean that a critical mass of influential Party leaders have reached the conclusion that the U.S. position, irrespective of what party is in power, who occupies the White House, is now fundamentally hostile to the idea of China emerging as a peer competitor, as a great power. The forwarding of China’s rise, the preservation of unipolar hegemony. I mean, do you think that this idea has or might soon to be so unchallenged within Xi’s inner circle, that we’re at a point of no return?Jeff: That’s another really hard question to answer. Gosh, my sense is that that notion on the Chinese side has gained widespread acceptance, that it is not unchallenged, but that it is the dominant view at the moment. That it reflects views on the Chinese side and also reflects perceptions of the way the U.S. has behaved, that persuade them that there is nothing that can be done to prevent a basically zero sum conflict of interests. Now to me, there are lots of shades of gray and the Chinese Communist Party certainly is capable of nuanced thinking. On the one hand, I think they think that containment of China which is sort of the favorite word they’ve developed over the decades, is deep in the heart of U.S. policy. And that is going to remain the case.The question of the degree to which that policy requires that the U.S. seek to hold back China rather than simply compete or out-compete China, I think that’s an open question. I think that’s an open question, frankly, on both sides. Is it onto the Trump administration? I felt that it was, picture a couple of sprinters running a 400 meter dash and there are two ways you can run. And one is outrun the other guy and the other is to try to trip the other guy. And I felt that the Trump administration thought that tripping the other guy was a pretty useful way of winning the race. I think in this administration, there’s more of an emphasis on the straightforward competition, but there hasn’t been a complete abrogation of the thought that we have to hold China back in some ways.And look, I mean, inevitably we’re going to hold China back on its access to military technology, that’s a certainty. No matter who’s in power in the United States. And inevitably, in the area of technology, access to technology, technology sales, technology transfer, there’s going to be constraints that go beyond purely military, that are going to find ways of trying to ensure a dominant role for U.S. technology in key areas going forward. And that, in some cases, will mean depriving China of access to technology. So there are a lot of gray areas in the middle here, but it doesn’t require that every decision be in terms of, is this helping the United States and thereby hurting China? Or is it helping China and thereby hurting the United States? There needs to be some understanding that there are going to be some decision areas where maybe it’s mutually beneficial.Kaiser: So let’s talk about how you see China in its relationship with the international system, the rules-based international order, some call it. And here, we’re talking about not just things like multinational organizations, like the United Nations and all of the organizations underneath that, not just about standard setting bodies as well, but also about the Bretton Woods system. You’ve made clear that you wouldn’t like to see China supplant the U.S. as the main rule maker, but you also believe that Americans will have to accept that China is going to be a rule shaper, that’s the term that you’ve used. And given China’s sheer size and its economic clout, that seems only fair. Do you think that current Biden administration policy is making the accommodations that will be necessary to allow China to take its rightful place as a rule shaper? And what are your ideas about how to get China involved, invested in international system as a participant?Jeff: I haven’t seen any indication that the Biden administration has thought about acceptance of China or ways to induce China to participate constructively in the international system. Every senior level statement I see from the administration talks about ways in which China defies the international system, and then does not proceed to, “Here’s what they need to be in conformity.” There’s obviously a certain arrogance about this, leaving aside the degree to which we conform with the international system. We can leave that aside for the moment, but things like the UN Convention and the law of the sea, which we have never ratified or the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty which we have never ratified, or any of a number of ways in which we have chosen to define the international rules-based system, in a manner consistent with our immediate objectives and interests.I have not seen that from the administration, but you remember back under Bush II, George W. Bush administration, Bob Zelek, who was then deputy Secretary of State gave a speech talking about China as a responsible stakeholder in the international system. He was talking about that as an aspirational objective. He wasn’t describing a present reality. And the Chinese reaction to that at first was baffled. They had trouble with the translation of it and some trouble with the concept. But over time they, I think, began to understand that this was, from their perspective, a constructive formulation that allowed them to play a role in, I don’t think Zelek talked specifically about rule making, but it was implicit in the concept.Now, President Obama was quite explicit about the need to take countries like China, and India, and Brazil, countries that had been relatively minor actors when the whole Bretton Woods system was set up and give them a role commensurate with their newfound power. That was an explicit objective of administration policy. Trump with America First, obviously didn’t believe in that. And the Biden people have frankly been silent on that. They’ve just been focusing on the negative side. So there’s a number of aspects to this issue, Kaiser. And one is the whole weakness of the institutional framework of the international system.China criticizes the UN Conception, which emphasizes alliances and partnerships. Says, “That’s all irrelevant.” That says a small clique of countries. What really matters is the UN, okay? That’s what they say. Well, the UN is a pretty feckless body as we know. All of the major bodies in the UN system, whether it’s the UNGA, the UN General Assembly, the IMF, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, all are in need of fundamental reform and fundamental restructuring if they’re to play the kind of role that they played for a while and that they need to play. I think that’s an enormous agenda. The thought that we could both bring China into a system of those institutions and at the same time reform those institutions, that’s probably asking too much. But I think as a theoretical and as a policy objective, we need to be thinking in terms of both.Kaiser: Do you think that it’s too late, Jeff, for Biden to change his tune on China? Already the administration has used China to push so much of its agenda, the Innovation and Competition Act, the infrastructure plan. It seems like everything the administration announces is couched in this language of competition with China. So has he left any space for himself to be able to, if not make a 180, at least to turn in a less oblique angle?Jeff: Yeah. I think you’ve framed it right, Kaiser. I think that first of all, this year is an election year in the United States, leaving aside what’s going on in China with Party congress. And so the thought that we’re going to see serious adjustments in China policy and election year when the Democrats feel highly vulnerable seems unlikely. But at some stage, we discussed earlier the fact that this administration doesn’t have an economic trade policy. At some point they’re going to have to have one. Yeah, you can’t go four years without a trade policy.And when the economic agencies are heard from, in particular treasury and commerce, both of whom have secretaries who are Janet Yellen and Gina Armando are going to be heard from. And they are more preachers of openness, and market access, and the international system than the voices we’ve heard so far. Now, that doesn’t mean a reversion to 20 years ago, but it does mean that there’s going to have to be a greater balance in policy between economic interests and other interests, where the economic interests at the moment are not represented at the table, frankly. So I think that that’s one thing that’s going to happen at some stage, I don’t know when.Kaiser: Likely after November. I mean –Jeff: Yeah. I mean, after November I think is right. I think that the fundamentals of what Biden wants to do are in place, but personalities matter. I don’t believe in the school of the extreme realist thought that countries are just sort of Newtonian objects moving through space. Actors matter and like in this administration, for example, I think John Kerry has played a role. I think obviously he played a central role in formulating the U.S.-China Climate Change Agreement with Xie Zhenhua, that wouldn’t have happen without him, without his determined efforts. But beyond that, I think that the phone call, I guess it was a Zoom meeting or they don’t use Zoom, whatever they use. The encrypted webinar that Biden and Xi Jinping had. I think that John Kerry had a lot to do with that as well is my guess.I think that Biden pays attention to John Kerry. John Kerry used to be his Senate colleague and was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And he’s someone who Biden regards as a peer. And I don’t think that Kerry has been altogether satisfied with the overall framing of policy. I’m speaking from 3,000 miles away in Venice, California. But rumors do make it across the country. So I think that that’s… I’ve mentioned Yellen, I’ve mentioned Armando, and Kerry, these are people whose voices have been somewhat muted, but who may have different views. I think the general framework is in place. I don’t expect, as you say, a 180. I think as you put it an acute angle or an oblique angle of that is possible.I think that one of the reasons that Biden did that virtual meeting with Xi Jinping, was he was concerned about the degree to which the relationship was off the tracks. Succession of shouting matches by senior officials in meetings with poorly prepared agendas, where both sides were posturing to each other’s domestic audiences, I think that that did not impress Biden. And I think that Kerry probably helped reinforce the perception on Biden’s part. So when there is a concern that a relationship is going to run off the tracks, I think that that’s when one sees Biden become more personally, directly involved, which I don’t think is a bad thing. I think that Biden’s own instincts on China are a balance of competition and cooperation. I’ve noticed that he seems to be unafraid of using the word cooperation, unlike the people who work for him.Kaiser: Yeah, yeah. He’s a little looser in the vocabulary in both directions. So a good portion of the piece that we’re discussing today is about, of course, Biden’s domestic political circumstances. And the extent to which his choices are circumscribed by Congress and by the voters who will go to the polls in November. So the conventional wisdom is that he has his hands tied, but are they really tied? I mean, you cite that Chicago Council poll on American attitudes toward China as evidenced that the so-called bipartisan consensus on China isn’t maybe as pronounced, at least within the public certainly, as people would have you believe. And I certainly agree. I’m sure that you still talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party, whether in Congress or in the White House, and I assume that you’ve raised these poll results with them. Do Democrats feel like this gives them more space when it comes to China? Do you get any sense that maybe there is a little bit of an opening?Jeff: I mean, I talked to people who were going into the Biden administration before January of 2021, and I made the argument that there was nothing that they could do to satisfy the hard Republican right on China. And we named names and they wholeheartedly agreed and understood that point. I was pushing on an open door when I made that point. It doesn’t matter what Biden does, he will continue to be attacked from the right on China. You look at the ads that are coming out already now, in congressional races around the United States and Republicans in primaries are denouncing the Democrats or even their own primary opponents in the Republican Party as being stooges of the Chinese Communist Party. That will happen no matter what.So the question then becomes, how much do you feel the need to accommodate that perception of people who are never going to be with you anyway and who are going to use China as a political weapon, no matter what? Now, it’s complicated because within Washington, I wrote that there is not a consensus within the Democratic Party on attitude towards China. And I was showing that Chicago Global Council poll, which showed numbers on whether China’s an adversary, whether China-U.S. policy should be aimed at preventing Chinese influence around the world, whether Chinese researchers and students should be blocked from coming to the United States, whether tariffs should be raised. And in every single case, there was a very large gap between Democratic responses and Republican responses.With Democratic responses being, let’s say calmer about China than Republicans. But that is candidly not reflected inside the Congress. I think that I will give the administration credit for correctly reading the Congress, that there is a reasonably hard line consensus within the Congress for a policy which focuses on strategic competition with China, to the exclusion of other issues. That said, in my experience in the U.S. government and through the odd years, administrations are perfectly capable of leading on China policy, preferably with Congress, but also it can be done without Congress. And I could cite many, many instances, obviously in the George H. W. Bush years when Congress kept passing legislation demanding conditions upon most favored nation status.And President Bush kept vetoing it every year and continued with his policy, despite a torrent of congressional criticism. In my time in the White House, from 2009 to 2011, I did not find congressional pressure close to unbearable on any aspect of China policy. China policy on The Hill has always been more hawkish and always been tougher than the administration policy forever, forever. That will never change. But an administration that knows what it wants, can get where it wants by leadership, by finding the right people in Congress to bring them along. And yes, congressional [inaudible] are a constraint, but they need not drive policy. That’s not what our constitution intended and not what any administration should want.There are a couple of pieces of legislation now, the Compete with China Act, which is mostly involved in building up U.S. industrial capabilities. It’s mostly what it does. And uses China as sort of a talisman. Look at China, we have to compete with them. Let’s do all of these things at home. Let’s rebuild our semiconductor industry. Let’s rebuild our educational system, let’s rebuild our manufacture capacity. Let’s rebuild here and there. That’s all good, frankly. I mean, it’s unfortunate that we have to use an excuse to do these thing, which we should be doing anyway. There’s some language in that legislation, there’s money. There’s a lot of money for propaganda against China for pointing out the flaws in the Chinese system. I’m not sure that that’s particularly good use of taxpayer money.I think that the time in which people look to BBC and VOA for the truth around the world has long passed in the era of globalization of news and the private news. So I think that’s frankly, mostly a waste of money. But that’s the main bit of legislation we’re looking at this year, which I don’t think need do too much damage to the relationship. If it’s looked at carefully, there’s a house version and a senate version with different language, with different consequences for the relationship in it. There are down the road, depending upon what happens in 2022 elections, there are other possibilities being discussed, such as limitations of scrutiny of U.S. outbound investment to China, which would be a big deal. It would be the first time in the world we have imposed broad scrutiny of outbound investments anywhere, aside from well –Kaiser: Cuba, Libya, North Korea.Jeff: Countries like Iran and North Korea. And I think that is something that bears close watching and where the business community, which is already deeply, deeply invested in China, needs to keep a close eye on that and needs to let the Congress know what they think of that before that creates a whole new reality.Kaiser: So if the Biden administration wanted to lower the temperature, what would you identify as some of the, let’s say more politically feasible things? I mean, because we do have to kind of acknowledge that yeah, they’re not completely constrained, but there are political hurdles that they would need to overcome. What are some of the things that they could do to signal an intention to lower the temperatures and things that the administration could do that might stand a chance at bringing congressional Democrats, at least, along with them?Jeff: Everything has risks and everything will get criticism. They need to start by understanding that. There’s not going to be a free ride in anything to do with China. I would say one obvious one is the Department of Justice, FBI, China Initiative, which is –Kaiser: On its last legs –Jeff: Creating a climate of fear on campuses around the United States. No other way of putting it. It’s a kind of Neo‐​McCarthyism in my view. The FBI denies it, but it’s frankly singling out Chinese and Chinese Americans for particular scrutiny and for, in some cases, ridiculous, trumped up legal charges and it is hurting us. It’s hurting individuals and it is hurting the United States as a nation. We talked about that a little bit earlier. That is one that, I mean, I’ve talked to people on The Hill, at least some people on The Hill on the foreign affairs side, understand one of them used the phrase abomination to me in talking about that program.Kaiser: That’s good to hear.Jeff: I think that there are going to have to be some compromises, but I’d start there. Secondly, tariffs, the Trump tariffs were completely arbitrary. Trump said repeatedly, “I love tariffs. Tariff wars are easy to win.” I don’t know an economist in the world who believes that, okay? None, we are to take Donald Trump’s ignorant rants on the subject of tariffs as guidance for U.S. policy in perpetuity? That’s ridiculous. There are thousands of businesses and millions of consumers in the United States who are being hurt by these tariffs. I’m not suggesting that these tariffs should just be lifted in a negotiation. They were put in place for reasons, but I don’t see any, at the moment, disposition on the part of the administration to negotiate on market access and on Chinese practices, like IPR violations or subsidies, export subsidies, subsidies for Chinese companies.I don’t see that they have a plan for negotiation on that, that might be usefully made part of a discussion about tariffs. Yeah, you don’t lift them all. You look around and see which ones will have the greatest impact, particularly at a time when we’re running 7.5% inflation. So I think those are two ripe candidates. I mean, the administration did negotiate a loosening of restrictions on journalists going in both directions. And they have made some minor adjustments in visas to, I think, make H-1B1 visas in the United States a little more secure and a little more available. But I think they can go much further on these. We shut down the Fulbright Program with China. That needs to be reversed. I mean, that should not be controversial.Kaiser: The Peace Corps too, yeah.Jeff: Peace Corps, we shut down as well. I mean, these are not national security issues. I mean, over the 50 years since Nixon went to China, we’ve built up tremendous people-to-people ties between our two countries, across every domain. And since Trump, we’ve been in the process of shutting them down. I think that the administration needs to come up with a sensible definition of what decoupling entails, what it entails in the military area, what entails in the technology area, what it entails in the economic area and try to limit that. I mean, the phrase has been high walls, small yards. I think that’s a good way of thinking about it.But I think they need to have a conception about decoupling that is much more constrained. It goes back to your question, Kaiser, earlier, do they need a strategy? Yeah, that’s one of the reasons you need a strategy. You need to know how you think about China in order to decide how you think about Chinese coming to the United States. And how you need to think about Chinese researchers and how you need to think about the attitude of ordinary Chinese towards America and what impact that has on the future of the planet. I mean, I have good friends at Brookings who have looked quite intensively at popular Chinese attitudes towards the United States, it is very dismaying what has happened in recent years.I mean, the years I lived in China, I have said many times that I never once encountered a manifestation of anti-Americanism, ever, in China. I’m not talking about editorials in the Global Times or things like that. I’m talking about in interpersonal activity, just none. Great warmth on the part of ordinary Chinese towards Americans, I fear that’s dissipating. And what I hear from friends who’ve looked at it closely is that there is evidence that that’s the case, maybe documentable evidence. And the thought that we can have a manageable relationship with China and the administration does talk about managing the relationship with China, I respect that. They don’t just talk about pulverizing China. They talk about managing the relationship, okay?But the thought that you can manage a relationship when the population of that country is moving towards outright hostility. And the same thing is happening on our side of course, if you look at ad polls, we’re creating a monster on both sides. This would be harder and harder to manage. That’s one of the reasons for example, the Chinese government has difficulty managing its relationship with Japan. I think China could manage a much more sensible, constructive relationship with Japan, except they’re always looking over their shoulder at the citizenry who bear long memories about Japanese atrocities in China and xenophobic attitudes among the broader population towards Japan in China. I would hate to see us reach the same point where the Chinese leadership is looking over its shoulder at its own population about whether it can have a constructive relationship with the United States.Kaiser: I worry about that too. And I think the point that you made about the importance of people to people relations is certainly not lost on this listenership anyway. In your estimation though, for the leadership, is Beijing eager for, or would it at least be receptive to and willing to reciprocate if we did pluck some of that lower hanging fruit that you enumerated? Things like restoration of Fulbrights or the Peace Corps. I mean, maybe at a higher tier, dropping some of the more onerous tariffs. If we did make clear our intention to lower the temperature, would Beijing be receptive and would it be willing to reciprocate?Jeff: The short answer is it’s hard to say unless you’re actually involved in a diplomatic negotiation because from the outside, you just see the hard line posturing and you don’t know what their degree of actual flexibility is until you get in the room with them over some months. But I mean, just two broad comments. Number one is that the Chinese system, historically, is not so much interested in low hanging fruit. Historically, their interest is in defining the overall character of the relationship. They want to know how do you see China? And they’ll go on at great length about how they see the United States.And their attitude is once we have each sincerely demonstrated our attitude towards the others, in terms of our objectives and our interests, the specific issues will fall into place. And historically, frankly, Americans have tended kind of in the opposite direction. Americans, historically, have figured, “Well, we’ve got big barriers in relationships. Let’s try to see what we can do. Let’s find the low hanging fruit. And we will build confidence as we accomplish small things, so that when we get to harder things we’ll have a basis for trust,” okay? I mean, you can transpose that to the Middle East, it’s our historic approach to Middle East peace negotiations.Kaiser: And you can transpose China’s attitude in that way to the India relationship. I was talking to a good friend of mine, who has been a reporter for the Hindu for a very long time, he’s based in Beijing. And one thing that he said was that India’s position is that they’ve got to resolve the border disputes, Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh, before the overall relationship can improve. And Beijing’s position has always been, “No, let’s get the entire relationship right and then the border will be resolved.” Yeah, so no, you’re absolutely right. That is a perfect characterization of how Beijing approaches it, which worries me, because that’s a profound disconnect.Jeff: Yes, that’s fascinating. Henry Kissinger talks quite a bit about this and his sympathy for the Chinese approach runs this way. He says that the Chinese attitude is that you can just solve a problem and then you can solve another problem. And doesn’t matter how many problems you solve, there’ll just be new problems that arise. So you’re always facing new problems. Whereas, if you agree on the framework, in their view, all the problems can be prioritized and dealt with. Not personally, I hate to be so wishy-washy, I think there’s wisdom in both frameworks, frankly speaking.But the Chinese have, in their discussions with the United States over much of the last year, have been quite adamant that they need signs, clear indications of the overall U.S. approach to China. And that we can’t just pick off climate change, or pick off this, or pick off that and expect cooperation when we have an overall policy of hostility. That’s what they’re saying. Well, that’s fine for them to say that. I don’t believe it. I mean, because in fact they did reach an agreement with Kerry on climate change after saying, “we can’t do these things.” So clearly they can do these things, but they still have a, if you will, cultural orientation away from the low hanging fruit approach.Kaiser: One last question for you before we move to recommendations. Even though you headed Asian Affairs at the NSC, one thing that’s consistent across all your writings on China, one thing that I think is a source of my admiration for all the work that you’ve done is that you never seem to view China or our bilateral relationship with China through that one singular lens of national security. And it strikes me, and this has been a consistent theme on the show, that we’re in a time where there is this kind of single lens view. Everyone only looks at China through this national security lens or too many people do in any case. Can you share with our listeners maybe, some of the precepts that you live by when it comes to thinking about China? You clearly have a broader and maybe, more holistic view of the relationship. And I’d love to hear what some of the maxims you live by are.Jeff: I guess my starting point in thinking about China comes back to what I said earlier, and that’s an appreciation of what the Chinese people and Chinese nation can accomplish. And never underestimating that, you are underestimate it at your peril. And that is not meant to conjure up a China threat. It is simply a statement of reality of the last 40 years, what they have accomplished from such a low base. And the way in which they set their minds to achieving an objective and the way in which they can marshal resources from all across the society to achieving it. We all remember when COVID-19 first struck in Wuhan and the Chinese government announced they were building a, I can’t remember, I’ll get the numbers wrong. But either it was a 10,000 bed hospital in, I can’t remember how many days, a few weeks.Kaiser: Like a week yeah.Jeff: It was ridiculous, okay?Kaiser: 3,000 bed I think it was, yeah. But yeah, yeah.Jeff: Whatever it was, okay. Well, whatever it was, no one else could do it. And they did it, okay? I remember when I was stationed in Hong Kong in the mid 1990s, there was a famous China watcher there who said he wasn’t worried about Chinese technology he said somewhat dismissively. He said, because anytime he went to China, he couldn’t find a functioning flush toilet. So that’s one of the reasons why he was not confident about their nuclear power plant, just 40 miles away from Hong Kong. I always got a laugh when he said that. And here we are, 25 years later and they’ve circled the dark side of the moon, they have a space program to Mars. They’ve identified all of the major technologies of the 21st century and asserted their desire to be leaders in many or most.They’re leading the world in construction of electrically powered vehicles. So I start with, so never underestimating the nation. Then the second place I go to is trying to come up with a realistic assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese Communist Party. And I know that when we say the Chinese Communist Party, we’re all supposed to tremble and it’s a fairly complex operation. It does some things well, and it does some other things terribly and oppressively, but it’s a mixture. And if we just caricature it, we’re not going to react to it sensibly. It’s got 90 million members. It is capable of tremendous message discipline and of carrying out plans and directives decided by the center at provincial and regional levels in the way that other countries can’t.It’s able to think longer term than Democratic systems find comfortable or normal. And it has overseen this spectacular rise of China into economic middle class prosperity and great power status in 30, 40 years. The weaknesses, it’s oppressive, information flow is uncertain towards the center. Who is talking to Xi Jinping? Is he hearing what he should be hearing? In a system like that, it cracked up under Mao. No one was willing to tell Mao what Mao needed to hear, everyone was terrified of him. One doesn’t hear encouraging signs of the readiness of people to offer different views to Xi Jinping, since he has acquired leadership of all aspects of the Chinese system in a way that hasn’t been the case for some years. Its treatment of minorities, the absence of rule of law, we know all of these things well, and the absence of human right protection. So I think we need to understand what China is about and then understand what the Communist Party is about in a serious way instead of just having a comic book picture of it.Kaiser: It’s just astonishing to me how consistently people are only able to focus on one side of the ledger, either the plus column or the minus column and to the exclusion of the other.Jeff: I think we’ve covered a lot of the issues in previous questions when you talked about what are China’s international ambitions? And I think that that is one that we, as Americans, need to focus on. But I don’t think it serves our interests or it’s intellectually honest to imagine an end state of China’s international ambitions. And so the teleological way that, 40 the years from now, they intend to dominate the world. I think that’s a ridiculous way of thinking about countries in a multi-polar world, which this world is going to be in the coming century.China is a major power, it’s feeling its oats. It’s throwing its elbows around, but it’s got severe limitations at home. We haven’t gotten into those, well, I’m sure you’ve done those in your other broadcasts about the demographic crisis China faces and whether China’s going to continue to be wage competitive at the low end of the income scale. Whether China can continue to create the jobs they need to, for all the kids coming out of universities. Whether a heavy handed approach to regulation of the business community, that has been in evidence for the last year, is going to be successful in creating the kind of moral society that Xi Jinping is talk about or rather is going to stamp out innovation.I mean, all sensible Chinese leaders know that the private sector is driving China’s economic growth and private sector and foreign investment. And they’re not a straight line, innovation doesn’t work in straight lines. You have to allow for innovation. And something happens way over in the corner there that then affects your progress in areas you really care about. And if you’re just, as they are now, saying, “We’re not going to tolerate unfettered growth in social media, internet technology, home tutoring, financial services.” I mean, they need to be very, very careful thinking that you can just squeeze one end of the economy and it’s not going to come out in ways that you don’t like elsewhere.Kaiser: Yeah. No, that’s another can of worms. I mean, we can spend another hour talking about the ins and outs of this Red New Deal. But thank you so much, Ambassador Jeffrey Bader, for taking the time to speak with me and for sharing the fruits of your truly formidable intellect and your very rich experience with our audience. I’m really honored and it’s just been such a great pleasure. Before I let you go, let’s give some recommendations as we do on every show. But first, a very quick reminder that Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project. And if you like the work that we do here, the best way to support us is by subscribing to The China Project’s daily Access newsletter. I’ll leave it at that. You know the drill. Okay, recommendations. Jeff, what do you have for us?Jeff: Sure, Kaiser. I think, well, I just read a book by a gentleman named Stephen Platt called Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom.Kaiser: Fantastic book. I love it.Jeff: Yeah, there’s a lot to learn from that. When you read of 15 years, 20 years of mayhem in Central and Southern China, with 20 or 30 million people killed, you gain an appreciation for the obsession with stability that Chinese, high and low have. You also are reminded of the gaps between North and South China. North China was Manchu dominated, South China was Han dominated. And you also are reminded of the remnants of imperialism and the impact of imperialism on China in terms ofoutside powers in the 1850s and 1860s, which was horrendous. And which Chinese see in disguised form in much 20th century behavior. So I think that’s well worth a read.Kaiser: Absolutely. Stephen Platt has another book that I absolutely loved as well, Imperial Twilight it’s called. And it’s sort of about China on the brink of the Opium War and the run up to the Opium War. That’s a fantastic book. But Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom was so very, very good. It focuses on the Shield King, on Hóng Xiùquán ‘s 洪秀全 cousin and –Jeff: The Shield King, yes.Kaiser: His story, yeah. Which is an angle that I wouldn’t have thought to take. Because the focus is always on Hong Xiuquan himself, but his cousin’s experience and I’m spacing his name right now, I’ll maybe go back –Jeff: Hóng Réngān 洪仁玕.Kaiser: Yeah, yeah. Okay.Jeff: Yeah, it’s fascinating. I agree. I tell you why it’s fascinating for you, and me, and many others, Kaiser, is that he was the guy in the middle. He was here, he had lived with the missionaries in Hong Kong and he understood how Westerners thought and he wanted to bring Western ways to China, Western industry, Western knowledge to China. On the other hand, he was the cousin of the Qing king, of Hong Xiuquan. And he was the chief actor for the Taipings and then ultimately in resisting Imperial forces, which allied themselves with the Manchu dynasty to try to crush the Taipings. And so these, if you will, well-intentioned people who one understood both sides got ripped apart. That’s the –Kaiser: I know how he feels. I mean, it’s astonishing to me how close he came to succeeding in bringing in the British on the side of the Taiping. I mean, it reminds me so much of that contemporaneous war that was being fought on the other side of the world, where we almost, I mean, it was touch and go there for a little while. So dependent on American cotton exports that the Brits almost sided with the American South, still sort of smiting about 1776 too. So yeah, yeah. It just reminds you of just so much contingency in history and yeah. Yeah, fantastic book and great recommendation. I have a couple of historical books that I want to recommend as well. And I’m going to sort of re-recommend things that were recommended by other recent guests, because that’s all I’ve had time to do.I’ve been trying to be good about reading the books that other guests have been recommending. Thank you for recommending one I’ve already read. Let me just second too, excellent, excellent recommendations from recent shows. I’ve plunged into them, and reading them in parallel. One was Anthea Roberts’ recommendation of the book, The Master and His Emissary by the psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist, which it was fascinating enough at first, just talking about the two hemispheres of the brain and really upending so much of the popular understanding of the function of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. But most intriguing of all, he is relating it to culture and to the historical development of the West versus the rest. And that part is just more speculative for sure, but more intriguing as well.You’ll be hearing more on this sort of thing on a big show that I’m working on for this series. The other is this fabulous book recommended by Dan Wong of Gavekal Dragonomics, who was on the show a few weeks ago, that’s called Unfabling the East. And, Jeffrey, if you haven’t read this, I highly recommend it. It’s called Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia by Jürgen Osterhammel, translated from the German. For my money, literally for my money, I went and bought it in hardcover, it’s just the best work of history I have read in years. Again, this one has already made its way into my prep notes for this show that I have planned. So stay tuned for that. Jeffrey, thank you once again. It’s just been an honor to be able to have you on the program. And I do hope that we can have you back again because there’s still so very much to talk about. And I so enjoyed this.Jeff: Well, thank you so much, Kaiser. I really enjoyed it. Enjoyed hearing your perceptions, no doubt in large part, since they’re similar to mine. And I hope that next time we do this, we’ll be able to report on a China and a U.S. that have moved in different directions from where they are right now. And we can have a happy, more upbeat conversation.Kaiser: Well, here’s to that. The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com or just give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts, as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook at @supchinanews. And be sure to check out all the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening and see you next week. Take care.

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This week on Sinica, a live recording from October 10 in Chicago, Kaiser asks Chang-Tai Hsieh of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, Damien Ma of the Paulson Institute’s think tank MacroPolo, and our own Lizzi Lee, host of The Signal with Lizzi Lee, to right-size the peril that the Chinese economy now faces from slow consumer demand, high youth unemployment, a troubled real estate sector, and high levels of local government debt. This event was co-sponsored by the University of Chicago’s Becker-Friedman Institute, the Paulson Institute, and The China Project.06:32 – What is the current state of the Chinese economy?11:14 – The origins of China’s crisis in comparison with crises from 1990 in Japan and 2008 in the U.S.14:25 – The real estate sector’s role in the crisis and possible solutions.22:51 – The significance of able management during times of crisis. Is this a crisis of confidence or expectations?29:34 – The question of the general direction of the Chinese economy.43:33 – What does an actual debt crisis look like in China?48:00 – The right U.S. policy toward China in light of current affairs.TranscriptKaiser Kuo: Welcome to this special live recording of the Sinica Podcast here in Chicago, Illinois. Hello, Chicago. I am Kaiser Kuo, and we are here tonight with this terrific and very handsome and well-appointed crowd from Chicago at an event put on by the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, a program that pulls together folks from Chicago’s Booth School of Business with its Kenneth G. Griffin Department of Economics, its Harris School of Public Policy, and its law school. Becker Friedman has partnered with the Paulson Institute, and its in-house think tank MacroPolo — still, the cleverest name ever given to an organization dedicated to research on China, MacroPolo. Let that sink in for a little while. It’s amazing. And with The China Project, of which this podcast is a proud part. We are all joining together to bring you tonight’s program — “Decoding China: China’s economic miracle interrupted?”A huge thank-you to our friends at the Becker Friedman Institute and at the Paulson Institute for making this happen in this magical spot. The sun’s coming down, and you look at the beauty of just the amazing Chicago skyline, what a view. If I am, sort of, not listening and wandering off, distracted, you’ll know exactly why. There’s so much to talk about, so let’s jump in. All summer long, we have heard deep pessimism about the state of the Chinese economy. There is a long litany of woes that have been repeated and amplified to the extent that I’ve gotten, frankly, kind of suspicious. Flagging consumer demand. We all know the stubbornly high savings rate accompanying that, the obvious problems faced now by major residential realty developers like Evergrande and Country Garden, high levels of youth unemployment, and, of course, enormous local government debt.Now, none of my guests today are the economists that American presidents and CEOs have often wished they had at hand. That is, economists with only one hand, and they don’t always say, "On the one hand, and, on the other hand." As for me, I don’t mind hearing or engaging a little, on the one hand, myself. So, on the one hand, ordinarily, when I do hear this level of hyper-pessimism, this sheer volume of doomsaying, much of it built on, frankly, motivated reasoning, my instinct is to be very skeptical. China, after all, has defeated, has defied predictions of doom many a time, including in the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and in the great recession after 2008, the crisis of 2015 when the Chinese stock market plummeted. It seems like it’s always able to muddle through.On the other hand, as a growing number of people whose views I very much trust have come back from trips to China recently, it’s clear to me that the pessimism isn’t by any means limited just to these distant economists or reporters writing about China from the outside. When we hear about the PTSD, the shell shock caused in places like Shanghai by the lockdowns and by the chaotic, confusing end to the COVID restrictions, coupled with this kind of flagging exports, weak signals from the manufacturing sector, unemployment, and, of course, confusion in policy direction overall, I do worry. I take the bears a little more seriously. Yet, back to that other hand, an economist whom I greatly respect, Arthur Kroeber from Gavekal Dragonomics, gave a very good talk at Harvard recently. He said that this bad news has been enlisted by some in claiming that their grand narratives, going back decades, were correct all along [cough], Gordon Chang. A relatively small amount of data, he notes, is being made to do an awful lot of work. That’s true. Today is really all about right-sizing the problem where the negativity might perhaps be warranted, and where it certainly is not, as well as identifying problems that perhaps aren’t being given sufficient attention in the reportage that we’re all reading. We’ll talk about the nature of the crisis and the nature of the state response, such as it is. Joining me to attack this important question with both hands, as it were, and to try to get this right is Chang-Tai Hsieh, who is the Phyllis and Irwin Winkelried Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the Booth School, who specializes in development and growth in the developing world. He’s an elected member of the Academia Sinica, I like that name, and a two-time recipient of the Sun Ye-Fang Prize. Chang-Tai, welcome to Sinica, again. Chang-Tai Hsieh: Thank you. Great to be here.Kaiser: Good up. Also joining is Lizzi Lee, who’s well known to folks who listen to Sinica or who follow The China project. She is the host of our YouTube show, The Signal With Lizzi Lee, where she does interviews with amazing people. She’s just a really expert interviewer. Lizzi also hosts the Chinese language show, Wall Street TV, Wall Street Today rather, 今日華爾街 [Jīnrì huá'ěrjiē], which is something I highly recommend. It’s about the only non-lunatic Chinese-language programming. I mean, everything else is either like hardcore party line or freaking Falun Gong, or what’s that cook’s name? Guo Wengui, right? And then there’s Lizzi, who’s like an island of sanity on YouTube.Lizzi Lee: The bar is pretty low.Kaiser: Anyway, the last time that we were together with Damien was here in Chicago. Our friends at the Chicago Council summoned us to do a sort of roundup of the 20th Party Congress, where some very, very interesting remarks were made. That takes us, of course, to Damien Ma, who is director of MacroPolo, the think tank of the Paulson Institute. Damien is the co-author of a great book, which I’m still constantly recommending to people. It’s really stood the test of time. It’s called In Line Behind a Billion People. It really looks at a lot of issues related to China’s economy and politics through the lens of scarcity. It’s a very, very good book. I highly recommend it. Damien is always one of the people I turn to for the straight dope on what’s happening in the Chinese economy. Damien, great to see you, man.Damien Ma: Very good to see you.Kaiser: Lizzi, Chang-Tai, what a great crowd we’ve had. Damien, let me start with you. You were just in China. You got back just a little over a week ago. You had both high-level meetings and some means or boots on the ground, some shoe leather work. Just talking to people who are either decision makers, economic decision makers at the enterprise level or above, and people who are just directly affected by the economy in China, people who’ve experienced the chaotic end of COVID and everything. What’s the skinny? What’s your overall takeaway from talking to people? Are things as bad as they say?Damien: Well, let me give a sort of two quick, but different observations. I think Kaiser, like you or Lizzi, when we go to China, we tend to not just stay in the hotel. I got there a few days early, so I could, first, walk around, do my own observations. Small things like, are the malls full? Right? Are people buying things? How normal does Beijing look? And caveat that, I mostly interacted with a very small slice of Beijing elites, so they’re not what I would call the true 老百姓 [lǎobǎixìng], right? They are still Beijing elites. So take that with a grain of salt. I talked to Chinese colleagues and talked to the dwindling number of foreign correspondents who are still fighting the good fight in Beijing, just to get a pulse from the people. And had my share of cabby conversations.Kaiser: Oh, those cabby conversations. Damien: The reason I wanted to have the cabby conversations, this is probably one interesting tangential observation, is that something like 90% of Beijing cabs are now electric vehicles made by a stand-owned enterprise. This really happened over the last several years. So, if you want to see the transformation in electric vehicles, look no further than Beijing City itself. And this is purely a stay-mandated drive. They basically wanted to help the state-owned enterprise. If you went to China prior to the pandemic, you would’ve probably ridden in a South Korean Hyundai. Those basically do not exist anymore. They’re all-electric vehicles now. So, if you want to get a little small slice of that change, Beijing does give you that little insight. But in terms of the economy, I’ll just say a couple things, and I think they’re the things we’re going to get into quite a bit with the other guests as well.Talking to people, talking to friends and colleagues, there does seem to be a sense of just things not going that well. People are not seeing the bright light at the end of the tunnel in terms of the economy. In this sense, the Chinese government is probably correct in diagnosing that there is a lack of confidence among households about where the economy is going. The malls were full, but you do not see a lot of purchasing behavior, which I thought was kind of interesting. There was a lot of more window shopping, so to speak, than people actually pulling out their credit cards. Although, I guess not credit card — paying with Alipay or WeChat. Because that’s all you can do these days in Beijing. I think that struggle is real.At the policy level what’s interesting is I think they understand that this is a problem. But there is, from what I can tell, a very strong debate about really what to do about it because there’s a lot of arguments, and we’re going to get into the different arguments. But I think it’s tough to turn around a consumer and household competence. It takes a while. It takes a combination of policy, it’s a combination of incentives, and also sending very credible consistent signals for a period of time to get people to understand where the economy is going. Part of the problem that the current leadership has is that it’s sending very mixed signals about what’s happening to the economy and what they intend to do about it.I think that’s injecting more confusion to average Chinese households. It’s a very tough conundrum. And if they don’t turn that around, it’s very, very hard to sustain the growth rate that they want, which is why they may want to stimulate, but stimulus will get you a very short-term bump. That might allow them to meet their 5% target for the year. But what happens in 2024? This is something that they’re truly grappling with, and I really got that sense from talking to average Chinese, Beijingers.Kaiser: Excellent. Now, not surprisingly, there are two other historical financial crises that the current situation is often compared to. One of them, of course, is the 2008 financial crisis that started in the U.S. retail housing market, but also the malaise that beset Japan beginning right around 1990. That one is brought up an awful lot. Lizzi, I know you have some thoughts on this. I’m wondering whether you think that China is also about to enter a long period of stagnation and painfully slow growth. Are there meaningful ways in which China right now is comparable to Japan then?Lizzi: In general, I’m always against making those quick and dirty historical analogies because I think they usually are more misleading than educational. In terms of Japan, my argument is that Japan’s problem is not really an asset market problem. It’s a structural problem in the sense that the Japanese economy has its interlinked financial sector and corporate sector, all collateralized by its lent value. If a piece of asset prices goes down, the entire system goes down with it. It reminds me of Charleston, those historical buildings in Charleston. If there were a sparkle fire, the entire city would burn down. The problem is not the fire, the problem is how the city is structured. In China, the system is much more fragmented, actually intentionally so. There’s not much financial linkage between China’s corporate sector and its financial sector. China’s problems are much more fragmented pockets of problems.You have cysts and tumors in local governments, in rural banks, but those problems tend to be separate from each other. The potential of a horizontal, like all-out contagion, I would say is low. People talk about whether China is going to lose in their 20 years and their 30 years like Japan. The fundamental problem is quite different. The similarity is only on the surface. That’s Japan. For the 2008 analogy, I would actually argue that the property market in China now is less like the pre-2008 United States than a few years ago, say 2015. And that’s a deliberate policy choice. China has been aggressively reducing its corporate sector's exposure to property market loans for the past few years. I mean, yes, property market loans are still a substantial part of commercial banks’ assets, but those are individual house mortgages quite unlike the United States.And we know Chinese households pay hefty, hefty down payments, and those loans are recourse loans. So, banks can claim alternate assets if they default. It was said to be like a safe net for banks. Commercial banks, if you look at their balance sheet, they’re actually quite solid. That’s very different from pre-2008 in the United States. So, just make those two. Kaiser: Yeah. Let me turn to Chang-Tai and ask you about the 2008 comparisons that are so often made. Let’s start by looking at the amount of leverage in the system. That’s one thing. We all probably are aware of the very high percentage of the cost of a home that you have to put down, whether you’re a first timer or a multiple-time home buyer in China, and the amount actually of equity that people have in their homes right now. But the other thing that seems to be missing is we don’t have mortgage-backed securities in China. We don’t have collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps that we’re betting against those CDOs, right? Is China less vulnerable in that regard?Chang-Tai: Let me just say three things. First, let me just repeat what Lizzi said, that it is always dangerous, but it’s very easy to draw analogies, right? But most of the time, the world is complicated, and they can be very misleading. If I think about two views that I see, it is that China needs a stimulus, and then China has a confidence problem. That is a misleading way to think about what’s going on now. Really, the way I think about what China is going through now, it’s a combination of two things. First, specifically, on Kaiser’s question, I think about the first issue. And I like to think about that as a reallocation problem. I think that there’s no question that there has been over-expansion in the housing sector in China.What does that mean? It means that because of the housing price bubble and because of other factors, too much resources have been dedicated to the real estate sector, say, in the last 15 or so years. Right? What do you do about that? Well, exactly the wrong thing to be doing is to double up. That’s exactly what you don’t want to do because that’s going to make the reallocation problem down the line even worse.Kaiser: What would constitute doubling down on this right now? You mean stimulating?Chang-Tai: Yeah. Either some form of stimulus that supports the real estate sector. Part of the problem is that there’s always going to be short-run pain whenever there is an adjustment process. Let me just say some of that has already taken place. The beginning of this process was really starting in 2018 when you started to see the crackdown of some of the largest Chinese conglomerates, the crackdown on arm bound, the crackdown on the…Kaiser: The gray rhinos.Chang-Tai: Right, the gray rhinos. Actually, since we’re here, for those of you who can look across the street, if you see those three towers right across the street, that was initially a Wanda project.Kaiser: Dalian Wanda.Chang-Tai: The three towers that you see just across the river, 200 yards from where we are. One of the consequences of the crackdown on the Wanda Group starting in 2018, was that they were forced to sell off those three towers. It’s now called Vista Towers, right? Vista Towers, and the new owners got it on the cheap because the Wanda group was forced to sell that, not just that property, but lots of the other stuff. Now, there’s still a lot left to be done. I’m not privy to the internal discussions of the Party on how they’re planning to deal with this. But let me just give you what I think is the right historical analogy to think about this issue, which is that it’s really not 2008, but it’s 1998.If you think about what happened in 1998, China put in place this program. I don’t know whether this was the official name of the program, but this is what people started to call it, which is ‘grasp the large, let go the small.’ It was essentially a program put in place by Premier Zhu Rongji to deal with another big reallocation problem. Kaiser: Bloated state-owned enterprise.Chang-Tai: It was a bloated state-owned enterprise. It was that you had a very large number. I mean, there’s some dispute about what the precise number is, like a very large share of capital, a very large share of the resources of the economy was going to inefficient state-owned firms. I think it’s the same question, which is, what do you do with that? There is going to be short-run pain, companies need to be closed, people are going to lose their jobs. You can postpone the pain by continuing to subsidize these companies by just renewing the loans and just kicking the can down the road. That’s not what China chose to do in 1998. It put this plan in place, which led to a lot of short-run pain. It led to a tremendous amount of short-run pain, but it was the largest closure and privatization program that I’ve ever seen in the world. A large number of firms were closed down. A large number of firms were privatized. There are interesting details about what privatization meant. We can talk about that next, but lots of people lost their jobs.This was the beginning of the process where it released the resources eventually for the millions of entrepreneurs, private firms to eventually emerge and grow in China. There are lots of details about what happened there. There were these institutions that were built on the financial side. We can talk about the asset management companies that were built in place. There are all kinds of that. It's not just that program, but it was coupled with lots of other things that were put in place at the same time. Now, I want to say I don’t know whether something like this is in the cards. That really is a short-run issue. The question is whether this short-run issue could eventually become a long-run issue if it’s not resolved.Kaiser: Actually, since the scale of it is very different, I mean, we’re talking about breaking and resetting a bone, right? It’s not just pulling off a bandaid. We’re talking about something, a major structural readjustment. Let’s look at what happened in ’99 when China was a much smaller portion of the global economy, and already it was incredibly painful. Domestically, I think you could draw a direct line to the Falun Gong, rise of Falun Gong and the sit-ins, or potentially politically destabilizing events in that time, right? Today, much bigger, much more integrated, much more risk of global contagion.Chang-Tai: In terms of the effect of the world, I think it’s absolutely right. But in terms of the scale of the problem in China, I think it’s much smaller.Kaiser: Okay. Chang-Tai: In terms of the scale, now, whether there is, I’m going to say the equivalent of Zhu Rongji and the people that were around him at the time, one of the key people at the time was Wang Qishan. Whether there’s that team now, I don’t know, right? I don’t know. But I’ll just say that when I look at other countries of the world, the vast majority of the countries around the world that face this kind of problem, they never solve it, right? Because it’s painful. And if things are painful, you just don’t do it.Kaiser: I want to drill down on this a little bit with Lizzi. You know that there’s nothing that shakes confidence in the economy more than uncertainty. And I think what I hear a lot of complaints about are the lack of clear signals and intention to backstop, coming from the leadership. In 1998, to Chang-Tai’s point, we had Zhu Rongji, a fairly firm hand on the tiller. We had Wang Qishan. Today, we’re just coming out of the transition. We have a relatively new premier, Li Qiang, and He Lifeng, just now appointed. Do we have the same sort of caliber of administrative management to the economy?Lizzi: That’s a really good question. I’ve been pondering this term crisis of confidence, as people talk about it in the media a lot. What do we actually mean by crisis of confidence? Like Damien, I also had the opportunity to interact with a cross-section of Chinese citizens. Some of them are entrepreneurs, some of them are low government officials, some of them are recent college grads. And I do get the sense that there is this general sense of anxiety and unease, which I have not seen before. I mean, we Chinese are a grumpy bunch. We complain about parents, about our kids, about our neighbors, etc. But this time I feel like the grudge is very much pointed toward current policymakers, even to the top leadership. The general sense is that there’s something amiss, and they’re not quite sure the direction this country is heading is what they imagined it to be. So, there’s that real sense of anxiety here.Kaiser: The product of the COVID closure and the lockdowns.Lizzi: Yeah, we can definitely talk about that. But my point is, that is actually not consistent with the raw economic data you see. If you look at the data, in the first half of the year, consumption actually went up by more than 8%. Wage and disposable income went up more than 6%. It’s not breakneck pace by any stretch of imagination, but it’s not that bad. I mean, it’s not great by Chinese standards, but it’s not a picture of doom and gloom. So, where does this sense of anxiety, this sense of we are completely in the wrong direction, there’s no hope, there’s no tomorrow coming from? Again, my thinking on this is still very much fluid, but I think it’s not quite a crisis of confidence. It’s more like what happens when there’s this huge gap between your expectation and reality.If you were born into a middle-class Chinese household, there are certain things that you take to be true, right? Your parents worked really hard, they bought a house, they already paid down the mortgage. You have your family wealth stored in your house, which will appreciate quite a lot, and that’s going to be a decent inheritance to you. And your parents invest really heavily in your education. Most of the college graduates now are from one child household. So, we study really hard. Your parents invest in your education. You go to a really good college, and you expect to be able to get a job in the tech sector, in the financial sector upon graduation, and have a really lucrative career. That’s the expectation that has been building in people’s minds for the past 10 plus years.But now, that equilibrium has been broken, right? First, you have these years of tech crackdowns. All the high-flying tech companies and financial companies are cutting. They’re not recruiting anymore. Those kinds of lucrative jobs are just not there. And then you have three years of lockdowns. And then you have this problem of a market thing where family wealth is now in jeopardy. Basically every single piece of that equation is no longer there. What you take to be 100% certain in the future is just not there. So, I would say it’s not really a crisis of confidence. It’s that gap between reality, between what you currently see and dream. I think that helps explain one puzzling phenomena. If you go to those recruiting fairs in China, they’re all empty, right?If youth unemployment is at 20%, you would imagine that people are eager to find jobs. They will take whatever is available out there, but why aren’t people not showing up at those recruiting fairs? That’s because those jobs that are offered are not the kind of jobs they want. So, when we talk about Chinese youth unemployment at 20%, which is a historical level for China, I think, by some standard, people should be on the street, right? People should be causing all kinds of social unrest. But that’s not what we see in China. I think people are disillusioned, but it’s not like they cannot find jobs and they have to starve on the street. That’s not what’s really going on. But back to Shanghai’s point, I think what’s really different this time is, when the central leadership, when Xi Jinping and Li Qiang announced this piecemeal measures to stimulate, to remedy the economy, the market doesn’t really take that, which is quite interesting.There are multiple hypotheses of what’s actually going on. But one thing that I think is quite different from Zhu Rongji’s time and now is that Zhu Rongji is not one single person. Zhu Rongji has a team of capable economic lieutenants who can actually execute his plans, right? Wang Qishan, people like that. Many of those people have been purged by Xi Jinping during past years of anti-corruption campaigns, especially Guang Da Xi (光大系) and 国开行 [the Guangming banking system and the China Development Bank], all those Zhu Rongji lieutenants. They were hit really hard during the anti-corruption campaign. There’s this general sense that the people who can do this are just not there. And I would say the opposite. There are so many people sitting on their hands basically waiting for directions from the very top leadership because they are afraid of the potential retributions.Like, “What if I do this and something went wrong? I might as well just listen to whatever the top dictates to me.” That kind of inaction, that kind of inertia, is what’s really pragmatic this time. I don’t have a really good solution to that, but this is what I see. And I just wanted to share that with our audience.Kaiser: Underlying a lot of this is a bigger question of China’s overall economic direction and what it is that Xi Jinping actually wants, the shape of the Chinese economy in his longer-term view. This is something that you’ve talked about a lot, and you actually identified back in 2017. I think you and Evan Feigenbaum wrote a paper that pushed your finger on this, I think proved very prescient. And we’ve seen these ideas echoed out of the 20th Party Congress. This move away from GDP uberalist toward a more sort of qualitative growth. Can you talk a little bit about that idea? And I’d love Chang-Tai to weigh in as well about your thoughts on what it is that Xi and the current Chinese leadership want the Chinese economy to be and to do. We’re no longer talking about KPIs for local officials measured in terms of GDP growth, but rather maybe in nanometers as you once kind of half-jokingly said, but accurately said.Damien: Right. We published a piece basically with the title — “Nanometers over GDP.” The idea is to capture, crystallize this sense that for 25 years, people were very much accustomed to Chinese introducing growth to meet a certain target, right? There was even this term in markets called the 问价爆破 [wèn jià bàopò]. Every time the economy would tank, they would do countercyclical stimulus because they want to achieve roughly 7% to 8% growth. Because that fixation was really important. But starting the 14th five-year plan it was very clear that the top leadership, in particular Xi Jinping, decided that was not going to be the case anymore. He said, “We’re not going to really have a… We’ll have a range, we’ll still sort of think about growth,” but basically, that target is now no longer valid.We shouldn’t fixate our entire growth strategy around that. That’s important because the problem is that they didn’t really clarify what the floor is going to be. So, how far can this fall? Are we talking 2%, 3%? What are they satisfied with? This is where I would, I think, agree and also disagree with what Chang-Tai and Lizzi said. I think we can all agree that this is not a 2008 Lehman Brother kind of housing crisis, a problem. And this is not what Lizzi says, sort of a Japanese-style balance sheet recession, which is, I think, Richard Koo branded that. The analogy with the late ’90s holds, it is a sort of debt problem. But last time there was debt on the balance sheet of state-owned enterprises. This time the debt is primarily on local government, right?Kaiser: But that $5 trillion that-Damien: Right. We can get to that number, but the main thing is that if you think about it, the macro conditions, though, are quite different now than it was in the late 1990s. Let’s recount what happened. China was about to enter the World Trade Organization, right? Right at the end in the 1990s. That really gave it a big lift in growth. And then China in ’96, ’97, had just privatized the property sector. That was a big growth driver. Now you have just the opposite. The property sector is declining, and they’re not really trying to save it as much as we think. There is no WTO, there’s nothing coming that way. So, I guess the question is, de-leveraging might be the right call, but to do it in a low-growth environment when it’s not clear what the future growth drivers are going to be, is that too risky of a gamble to execute right now when the entire system is saying, “We don’t care that much about GDP growth anymore,” right?When you grow, even if you take on debt, you can actually inflate away that debt if you have inflation. Actually, debt just becomes a smaller portion of GDP over time. That’s essentially what happened since the late 1990s.Kaiser: But unpack this a little bit. Tell us, what’s the positive vision? What do they hope to achieve? When they talk about qualitative growth, what does he really need?Damien: Well, this is my own interpretation, my view is that China wants to become the Amazon of countries. Amazon is the everything store. China wants to be the make-everything country, essentially. If you think about the 1990s, what was the main moniker attached to China? Factory of the world?Kaiser: Of world.Damien: 2023, what is China set to do? Also, factory of the world. Just those factories have changed from socks and Nike shoes to batteries and low-end chips, and all those technology products. I think China really feels it’s got a strong competitive advantage in all these mid-range tech supply chains, manufacturing. Obviously I’m exaggerating to say make everything, but I think the strategy is can we attract a global supply chain ecosystem to China, make it there, and export it around the world that might offset some of the other growth drivers that are slowing down?Kaiser: Lizzi, you had an interesting way of talking about it. You used a martial arts metaphor. You said it’s 练内功 [liàn nèigōng]. I don’t know how to translate that, sort of like your internal, like cultivating internal…Lizzi: Right. Yeah, I agree with Damien’s framing, but I would use a slightly different word. I think China’s really focusing on the resilience of its system. Here in the United States, we tend to focus on the final product. When we want to develop the EV industry, we focus on consumers, cars, right? We focus on subsidies and policies, policymakers, energy, and so on. In China, they take a much more holistic view on what EV means. They started from rare minerals down to infrastructure, down to batteries, down to the cocktail of government subsidies, tech breaks, and consumer tax credits to the final product itself. That’s a much more vertical way of thinking about what a product actually means.By the way, that ensures that the whole system has enough flexibility. So, if you want to attack a single part of that system, we want to make sure that there’s enough fluidity in the system itself for the system to heal itself. So, a single act of sanction won’t break the entire system. I think that’s what I mean by 内功 [nèigōng]. It’s the chi, the circulation that matters. Damien: Also because the external environment is just not as conducive to China’s products.Lizzi: Yes, absolutely. One thing that I noticed is that there’s a lot of focus on how to adapt to hostile external environments as they speak of, as we can see from the case on Huawei, right? I think they expect that to happen in the future. They sort of preempt future sanctions and restrictions by making sure there’s enough leeway in the system to have at least three or five years of buffer to sustain that attack. Huawei did not survive by making trailblazing breakthroughs in 5G in chips. Huawei literally found a get-around, Huawei developed a software system to get around hardware restrictions. Huawei developed those chiplets quite literally by stacking inferior chips together to achieve roughly the same thing as those high-speed chips can do. I think that’s what China has gotten really good at. For most of the business and industrial organizations, top technology is actually not necessary. You just need to find something that works and execute that really well. I think that’s what China’s focusing on.Kaiser: Chang-Tai, how would you describe it? You talked about this period of readjustment that we’re in right now. What’s the end goal of that readjustment? What is the imagined end state post-readjustment?Chang-Tai: I’m going to get to your question, but let me just say that I think there’s something else there. And I was asked this question, but I’m going to ask the question to the other people on the panel because I don’t have an answer. There also just seems to be something more than resilience. I don’t know what it is about this view that certain things, that certain products or certain technologies are the ones that are valid, and other things are invalid. Maybe a example is that there is that semiconductor chips are a real thing, and it’s something that China needs to be, and it’d be great if China were good at making semiconductor chips, but coming up with a software, the very best software in the world to design semiconductor chips, that’s not a real thing.Kaiser: I’m not sure that they would classify that as not a real thing. The things that they think are not real things are creating complex financial, derivative-based products, doing social media. They don’t want their best and brightest being steered into, like in the United States, they want their physicists to graduate from Tsinghua and freaking do physics. They don’t want them to go work for a social media company or go work for a bank to design speculative products.Chang-Tai: I mean, for some products, you can say that they’re negative externalities, right? They’re negative. But why is a chip company or the revenues from a chip company more valid than the revenue of Alibaba right? But there’s a very clear sense in which one company is really valuable and the other company is less so.Kaiser: Because they want to be Germany.Chang-Tai: But why?Kaiser: Because they really, honestly believe, and this is something…Chang-Tai: No, no, no, but I-Kaiser: I get into this in this documentary.Damien: Because software platforms, social media has social political ramifications, ultimately.Kaiser: That’s only part-Damien: I mean, that’s one factor. A chip is a chip. It doesn’t have that baggage.Chang-Tai: No, but maybe, but even something like food delivery, software for food delivery, that has no political ramifications. But my sense is that if you ask them, they’re like, “Who cares if you come up with a better food delivery software?”Kaiser: Well, I mean, you’re the one who introduced this phrase earlier in the conversation — grasp the heavy, let go of the light. This is exactly what they believe they’re doing right now. That’s what they believe in themselves. What was the phrase, though? Arthur Kroeber, a great talk, you should check out. He says, “China wants to be a Leninist Germany.”Lizzi: Leninistic Germany.Chang-Tai: I think that’s exactly the right phrase, but let me just ask the question is that… Let me just pull two companies. Nvidia is one, right? That is one. It’s the leading…Kaiser: GPU maker, yeah.Chang-Tai: Chip company in the U.S. For those of you who know Nvidia, Nvidia makes nothing, right? It just designs chips. It’s just incredibly good at chip design. They also are really good at doing the software for AI, but it makes nothing. So, think about Nvidia versus Taiwan semiconductors. Which Taiwan semiconductor, what they know how to do really well is to actually make it, right? I guess for my vantage point, as an economist, I think both of these things are incredibly valuable. How valuable they are, well, it’s what people are willing to pay for these sorts of things. But the leaders of the Party, I think they think about it differently and I don’t fully understand why. Let me just say that there’s one thing there, right? There’s one thing, or like, so say, software to tutor kids, clearly, that’s of no value, but why not, right? I mean, kids learn and…Kaiser: Well, in this case, they believe clearly that this creates social problems by inequity just by the inequality of opportunity, right? That’s in this case, I don’t think that they would look at one part of the value chain and another part of the value chain in something like semiconductors and say, “This part isn’t important and this part is.” I think that when it comes to semiconductors, though, they do believe that the manufacturing process is absolutely vital and that they should focus on never stopping manufacturing because they really buy into this idea that process knowledge, that the actual innovative advantage conferred by continuing to manufacture is very real.Damien: I think another fact is just China has basically converged with the West on software on the app economy. I mean, China frankly makes some of the best apps in the world already, right? So, the gaps where they feel they’re still deficient are in a lot of these hardware segments.Kaiser: We could go on with this one for a while, but I want to get back into a really cheery topic, which is local debt. Damien, MacroPolo recently put out an estimate that there’s about $5 trillion of local debt that’s at risk in the next three, oh, default in the next three years.Damien: Potentially, yes.Kaiser: Let’s just put that in perspective. What was 2023? The projected GDP is $19.4 trillion. So, we’re talking about north of 20%, of 25%.Damien: Well, but remember, but the debt to GDP ratio, it’s always higher, right?Kaiser: It’s always higher. Right.But I want to ask Chang-Tai, what does an actual debt crisis look like in China? What are the ramifications? What are the spillovers? I mean, if you are a money manager and you’re looking at China, where do you steer away from? Where do you think you want to limit your exposure in China where we start seeing massive default of local government debt?Chang-Tai: Let me just firstly give a direct answer to, it’s clearly the property sector. But in the property sector, there could be some part of the financial institutions. If you think where a lot of the action is taking place, it’s really in the combination of these local financing vehicles and shadow banking. Some of these, we have data, a lot of these we don’t. So, there’s a bunch of it. But let me just push back on that. I don’t think that really is the biggest issue. I think the biggest issue is what Lizzi was talking about, which is this view that things have changed in China. And I want to hone in on one thing, so let me put it this way. One way I have thought about China for a long time is that despite the fact that there are no formal property rights, there was this very clear sense about what the rules of the game were.That is, if I’m an entrepreneur, I don’t engage in politics. If they want to make me a member of the local National Party’s Congress, I will do it, of course. But if I don’t engage in politics, I will be left alone. Although there’s nothing formal about it. My property rights are going to be protected. I can grow, I can make money, I can accumulate my wealth. I think of it almost like this marriage. If I think about what a good marriage is, it’s about, there are clear expectations on both sides about what proper behaviors — Nothing is written down, right? There’s no prenup. After the fact, I think what happened last year may have shattered that contract.Things that I thought only happened to dissidents, things that only happened to somebody like Jack Ma, I didn’t think about it then, but maybe this sense of what happened in 2022 is that, hey, the Party can actually be really crazy, the Party can actually do really crazy stuff. And this crazy stuff can happen to me, even if I’ve done nothing. That may be part of it. I don’t quite know how to quantify it. I’m curious to know your views on how much is going on, but I think of it as the breakdown of a marriage - ‘These were the things that I believed about you, and now I don’t believe in it’. Kaiser: You and Lizzi are apparently on the same wavelength because recently she was on our sister podcast, The China Global South Podcast, talking about this, the same sort of breakdown of the informal, the contract.Chang-Tai: The contract. Right.Kaiser: Interesting. We only have a few minutes left. I really want to focus on one final big question. I’ll start with Damien. What should U.S. policy do? We seem to be all indulging in a kind of schadenfreude, looking at China’s travails economically and almost gloating over it. But China is deeply interconnected. It could bring our house down as well. It could impact us negatively. What is wise American policy when it comes to China right now in terms of supporting or helping along its economic troubles? What should we be doing? Should we be rooting for China, or should we be rooting for the forces that reset China?Damien: Well, look, the U.S. and China are still 40% of the global economy. You look at what’s going on at a macro level, Europe’s not doing so hot. Germany, France, not doing so hot. It could enter a recession. In The United States, that debate is still outstanding, whether in a few quarters, we might still see some recessionary characteristics. Kaiser: Please not before November.Damien: And the Chinese, even if they stimulate, they’re probably not going to get too much above 5% this year, which is fine, but not great. So if we’re thinking about global economic stability, there’s no reason why the U.S. and China should think about how to provide the anchor as 40% of the global GDP, which they did try to do back in 2008 and 2009.Kaiser: That’s right.Damien: I think this is a time that’s going to be needed more than ever, the geopolitical volatility asideKaiser: Can you imagine China having a major financial crisis that threatens to bleed into the global economy and the U.S. stepping up in the way that China did in 2008?Damien: Well, I don’t think the nature of the crisis is going to be that sort of a global contagion like that because it’s not going to come from the formal financial sector. It’s mostly going to be a domestic debt crisis. But a China that grows below its potential is not a good thing when the world needs growth. And I think markets, investors are going to be looking for growth. And if all the big three pillars, the EU, the United States, and China, their trifecta are all kind of anemic, that’s not a good outcome for the global economy.Kaiser: Absolutely. Lizzi, what are your thoughts on this? And then I’ll leave for Chang-Tai at the end.Lizzi: Right. I’m going to answer a slightly different question of what doesn’t work for the United States. I think by making China look bad, by making China do bad, that clearly does nothing for the United States to strengthen itself. And I see a lot of deflections, reflections in the media when it comes to China from policymakers. I do think the United States needs to think harder about what its own strength is and what its own course is. Ultimately, the United States can only become stronger by becoming stronger. It won’t become stronger by making China look like a bully, making China look weak. I don’t want it to go like a full therapist on this, but I think there’s a lot of soul-searching for the United States to do, and it has nothing to do with what China looks like in the future.Kaiser: Run faster, goddammit, and stop trying to trip the other guy.Lizzi: Right.Chang-Tai: I don’t think that’s completely right. Let me try to articulate what I think the U.S. is struggling with for a long time. I think that we have all believed, and it’s true, of course, that everybody gains from trade and investment. If China grows, the U.S. gains. If the U.S. grows, China gains. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. What the U.S. is struggling with is the question of suppose that, or let me put it this way. I will give an analogy. Suppose that there’s a powerful CEO, right? The owner of a company that you know, or that you believe is a racist. If that person is poor and they’re a racist, it doesn’t matter because they have no money, right? The question is, what if this person is worth a trillion dollars and this person… It’s not a problem if this person just wants to buy a fancy yacht with…Kaiser: And now we’re talking about Elon Musk.Chang-Tai: Yeah. No, that’s a question. Suppose that Elon Musk is going to do stuff that you fundamentally disagree with, and he can do it if he has money, right? The question is, what are you going to do? You are going to lose if you don’t buy that Tesla, right? You love that Tesla, but you buy that Tesla, and that person starts to do stuff that you fundamentally disagree with. I think that is the tension. That is what the U.S. is really struggling with. And it’s a spiral that’s going on, which is this fear in the U.S. on what are you going to do with your economic power, right? Then on the other side, on the Chinese side, there’s this widespread belief that the goal of the U.S. is to destroy China, right?And this speaks to the question about, oh, China faces a hostile environment, so we got to build resilience. You can see how these two views of the world easily reinforce each other. And you could start off with a situation where China has no intention towards the rest of the world. That Elon Musk is really a nice guy, but then you start to do stuff towards him, and Elon Musk feels threatened, then they start to do so. I think that is the spiral that we are on. And that could get both sides to do things that they originally did not want to do. So, what should U.S. policy be? I don’t know. I think that that’s a very dangerous spiral that we are on now.Damien: Convergence on capabilities, divergence on values.Kaiser: Yeah. We should all go home tonight and ponder deeply the question of whether China is Elon Musk or Bill Gates, and that will shape our… Or somebody even who’s not George Soros.Chang-Tai: But it’s endogenous. That’s part of what I’m saying is that whether somebody becomes Elon Musk or Bill Gates is endogenous. Kaiser: Right. I don’t think it’s entirely. I think that the way that we treat that person also determines how-Chang-Tai: Of course.Kaiser: Not entirely an endogenous question. Alright, folks, thank you so much for coming and for joining us in this great conversation. Damien Ma, Chang-Tai Hsieh, and, of course, Lizzi Lee. All right.

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This week on the Sinica Podcast: a lecture by Robert Daly, director of the Wilson Center's Kissinger Institute, delivered last year to D.C.-based Faith & Law at their Friday Forum. The lecture, titled "Is Our Foreign Policy Good? American Moral Absolutism and the China Challenge," is a powerful and thought-provoking talk. Kaiser follows up with a long conversation with Robert about the themes raised in the talk, and then some. Enjoy.03:04 – A talk by Robert Daly from June 24th, 2022, given at Faith & Law’s Friday Forum45:49 – What is lacking in the mainstream dialogue about American policies on China-related issues?49:37 – Over-willingness to turn towards a military approach in the U.S.-China relationship in recent years1:00:48 – The missionary aspect of the American approach in dealing with China1:05:02 – The differences and commonalities between Chinese and American exceptionalism1:17:42 – Are we in a state of Cold War with China?1:23:54 – The question of moral standing in light of whataboutism1:27:08 – Comparing American intentions with Chinese realities and the issue of moral absolutism1:44:50 – What a “Just Cold War” would involve?1:51:34 – Can the U.S. imagine a world in which it is not a hegemonic power?A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.Recommendations: Robert: The House of Sixty Fathers (a Newbury Award-winning book) by Meindert DeJong with illustrations by the late Maurice SendakKaiser: Wolf Hall: A Novelby Hilary MantelAnda Union (Inner Mongolian band)

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Jason McLure, a correspondent for a new investigative reporting outfit called The Examination, and reporter Jude Chan, who writes for Initium Media. The two worked with two other reporters on a fascinating expose, funded by the Pulitzer Center, of China's tobacco monopoly, the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration (or China Tobacco), and how it has managed to be both the biggest seller of tobacco in the world — and also the effective regulator of tobacco laws in China.06:41 – The origins and mission of The Examination09:24 – An overview of the tobacco industry in China12:17 – What is the true power China Tobacco holds in the Chinese tobacco industry?14:34 – The history and inner workings of China Tobacco20:30 – China Tobacco - a manufacturer or a regulator?28:42 – The current situation of anti-smoking advocacy in China31:47 – The role of smoking in the Chinese culture and the gender discrepancy within the custom of smoking39:09 – How does China Tobacco manage to prevent the implementation of smoking bans in Chinese cities?48:07 – What was the reason behind the faltering of promising initiatives regarding smoking control?55:33 – The approach of Chinese youth towards the unequal fight with China Tobacco?A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.Recommendations:Jude: Zhang Chunqiao: 1949 and Beyond by Zheng ZhongJason: Top Boy (British crime drama on Netflix)Kaiser: The music of Florence Price, and especially Symphony No. 1 and Symphony No. 3 recorded by the Philadelphia Orchestra

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This week on Sinica, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1950 concert tour of China by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1973, Kaiser chats with Matías Tarnopolsky, the orchestra’s president and chief executive; Alison Friedman, the executive and creative director of Carolina Performing Arts; and virtuoso guzheng player and composer Wu Fei about the legacy of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s China tour, their continuing connection with China, and their concert performances in Chapel Hill, performed to the day on the two closing nights of that historic tour 50 years ago.07:00 – The China connection in the overall identity of the Philadelphia Orchestra11:32 – 缘分 [yuánfèn] and the serendipity of the commemorative concert in Chapel Hill14:19 – What can we learn from the original Philadelphia Orchestra members?19:49 – Has the interest in the China-U.S. culture exchange started to fall off in recent years?25:04 – Music as the common ground in the light of worsening relations with China28:02 – “What’s the orchestra of today?” as the leading theme for the commemorative concert31:10 – The significance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 to the orchestra’s history in China33:41 – The inspiration for Hello Gold Mountain and its connection to Jewish history in ChinaA complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.Recommendations:Matias: Soave sia il vento (the trio from Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte)Alison: Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics (podcast)Shanir Blumenkranz’s musicFei: Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (avant-garde metal band)Kaiser: Good Harvest 大丰收 (restaurant)Matteo Mancuso (Sicilian guitar virtuoso)

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This week on Sinica, Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran journalist Ian Johnson, now a senior China fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, joins Kaiser to discuss his new book, "Sparks China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future." Profiling both prominent and lesser-known individuals working to expose dark truths about some of the grimmest periods of the PRC's history, including the Great Leap Forward famine and the violence of the Cultural Revolution, Johnson argues that the efforts of China's "counter-historians" have managed to survive the stepped-up efforts of Xi Jinping to control the historical narrative completely.03:27 – Is the obsessive control of historical narratives a particularly Chinese phenomenon?07:19 – The life of Ai Xiaoming and the creation of a collective memory as one of the main themes in the book21:46 – The story of Jiang Xue, citizen journalist25:22 – Journalistic stubbornness of Tan Hecheng28:39 – Cheng Hongguo and the Zhiwuzhi salon30:26 – Common traits shared by many Chinese regime critics37:17 – Is there a link between dissent in China and Christianity?39:53 – Historical nihilism and sensitive topics for the Chinese Communist Party47:08 – Are counter-historians especially noteworthy because they’re exceptional, or representative?57:36 – The most important insight the book adds to our understanding of regime critics in ChinaA complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.Recommendations:Ian: The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideasby Gal BeckermanUnofficial Chinese ArchivesKaiser: Death in Venice and Other Tales by Thomas Mann, translated by Joachim Neugroschel

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser speaks with Representative Rick Larsen of the Washington 2nd District, the co-founder and continuously serving Democratic co-chair of the bipartisan U.S.-China Working Group. Last month, he published a white paper outlining his recommendations for how the U.S. can more effectively compete. That paper and its recommendations are the focus of this week's show.02:35 – The origins of the U.S.-China Working Group04:44 – Updated version of the white paper: new priorities and recommendations in response to the new reality07:42 – What is the danger of bifurcating the world into blocs in Biden's administration?11:16 – Four guiding principles behind a four-point strategy.16:09 – Five issue areas mainly affected by the four-point strategy: national security, development, diplomacy, technology, and education.18:38 – What should be the approach we take toward China’s Belt & Road Initiative?29:40 – The ideas for changes in education investment in the U.S. and the role of China34:08 – The response to the paper from the members of Congress as well as the general public37:53 – Is there a bigger change happening regarding the relations with China?A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.Recommendations:Rep. Larsen: Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe by David MaranissKaiser: The Driftless Area (a topographical and cultural region in the Midwestern United States)

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Karen Hao, a reporter recently with the Wall Street Journal whose previous work with the MIT Technology Review has been featured on Sinica; and by Deborah Seligsohn, assistant professor of political science at Villanova University, who has been on the show many times just in the last three years. Both Karen and Deborah have written persuasively about the importance of renewing the U.S.-China Science and Technology Agreement, first signed in 1979 shortly after the normalization of U.S.-China relations under Jimmy Carter and renewed, for the most part, every five years without much fuss — until this year. Karen and Debbi make clear what has been accomplished under the agreement’s auspices, and why GOP concerns are largely misplaced.03:45 – The origins of the STA and the reasons for establishing it07:34 – Criticisms against the agreement — the question of IP theft and PLA’s engagement17:53 – What is the real reason behind such a strong opposition towards the agreement?22:23 – How have the dynamics between China and the U.S. contribution to the STA changed over the years?30:36 – The consequences of ending the scientific relationship with China on the example of the terminated space exploration cooperation35:23 – Which specific projects would be put on hold in case of lack of renewal of scientific cooperation with China?41:23 – Other scenarios for cooperation in the area of AI in the possible absence of the STA50:10 – Are there parts of the agreement that should be enhanced or improved?53:50 – What’s the chance for a renewal of the agreement after the six-month extension?A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.comRecommendations:Debbi: Abortion Opponents Are Targeting a Signature G.O.P. Public-Health Initiative by Peter Slevin (in The New Yorker)Karen: Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daren Acemoglu and Simon JohnsonKaiser: King’s War (Chinese TV series 《楚汉传奇》Chǔhàn chuánqí on NetflixMentioned:The Case for Renewing the U.S.-China S&T Cooperation Agreement by Deborah Seligsohn (article in CSIS)

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This week on Sinica, MIT professor Yasheng Huang joins Kaiser to talk about his brand new book The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why they Might Lead to its Decline. This ambitious and thought-provoking book is bound to stir up quite a bit of controversy. It’s a long conversation — but worth the listen!04:11 - The impact of the Keju system on China today - an overview of the big questions in Yasheng Huang’s newest book07:31 - How does the framework of scale and scope correlate with homogeneity and heterogeneity?12:33 - M-form and U-form economies - which one describes contemporary China best?23:43 - How did the Keju system develop into a perfect scaling tool?36:22 - Did Imperial China have a weak civil society?44:05 - The GDP metric as a modern equivalent of the Keju system50:00 - The design behind a political ladder to the highest positions in the central government1:06:26 - The question of literacy and its possible neurobiological impact on people in the West and East1:24:05 - Gordon Tullock and the succession problem in China1:30:36 - T in the WEST: Technology1:37:57 - The correlation between technological inventiveness and the prevalence of warfare1:53:58 - Can Xi Jinping step down? Xi’s anti-corruption campaign - its consequences, and other possible scenariosA complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.Recommendations:Yasheng: American Prometheus: The Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture OPPENHEIMER by Kai Bird and Martin J. SherwinKaiser: @DrewDurnil (YouTube channel)

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Something different this week on Sinica: A selection of "This Week in China's History" columns by James Carter, all narrated by Kaiser with a little interstitial music by Chunqiu (Spring & Autumn).

The columns: * Not just a metaphor: Dragons of imperial China show us how people lived (1517) * The ‘Empress of China’ and the beginning of U.S.-China trade (1784) * The rise of Empress Dowager Cixi (1861) * In the 7th century, a Chinese coup of Shakespearean proportions (626) * Titanic’s six Chinese survivors tell a story that goes far beyond a shipwreck (1912) * The problem with Mao’s ‘continuous’ revolution (1967) * The Battle of Red Cliffs and the blurring of fact and fiction (208-209)

The music: snippets from * The Huntsman * The Last Page (intro) * The Subcelestial * A Call from Afar * Between the Mountains and the Sea * Born of the Storm * Born of the Storm (again) * A New Day * The Last Page (outro)

All these tracks and more are available on Spotify here or on YouTube here.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back Lyle Goldstein, director for China engagement at the think tank Defense Priorities and previously a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, where he taught for 20 years. Lyle offers his perspectives on an extensive wargaming exercise focusing on a Chinese amphibious assault on Taiwan, conducted under the auspices of CSIS (the Center for Strategic and International Studies) and published in January of this year — the first such exercise whose findings were made public. He offers insight into the real value of the exercise, as well as some of its shortcomings.

01:03 – The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan – the first large-scale publicly available wargame conducted by CSIS

04:05 – The history of wargaming and its significance

09:09 – What is the value of wargaming?

13:12 – The physical setup of the wargames and the role of dice and technology in contingency

17:49 – The assumptions that go into the game

22:05 – How much agency do the players have?

24:16 – How are the decisions of other countries factored in the wargame?

26:11 – Pros and cons of the CSIS wargame

31:57 – Thoughts on the possibility of nuclear escalation

38:43 – A take on the report’s assumptions and conclusions

47:37 – Will we get a warning?

A complete transcript of this episode is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

CSIS Report: The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan

Lyle: Yin Yu Tang in Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts

Kaiser: The Story of Civilization [Volumes 1 to 11] by Will & Ariel Durant

Our Oriental Heritage: The Story of Civilization, Volume 1 by Will Durant

Mentioned: Meeting China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging US-China Rivalry by Lyle J. Goldstein

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This week on Sinica, Paul Triolo returns to the show to give us a rundown on what's happening in the exciting arena of generative AI in China. The veteran China tech watcher, who is now Senior VP for China and Technology Policy Lead at Dentons Global Advisors ASG, is Just back from a trip to China during which he spoke with numerous companies working in the space, Paul offers a great overview of what various companies are doing, and how they're responding to U.S. restrictions on the export of key hardware needed for large AI training and modeling.

The timestamps and transcript will be up in a couple of days. Check back here soon for an update!

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This week on Sinica, with Kaiser on holiday we're running a terrific Twitter Spaces conversation convened by Neysun Mahboubi of UPenn's Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He's gathered a great group including Yawei Liu, whose U.S.-China Perception Monitor under the Carter Center is the co-sponsor for Neysun's series, as well as Anna Ashton of the Eurasia Group, Robert Daly of the Kissinger Institute, Rorry Daniels of the Asia Society Policy Institute, and Ian Johnson of the Council on Foreign Relations. Enjoy this in-depth exploration of the state of U.S.-China relations — as well as the opening segment on the fate of ex-PRC Foreign Minister Qin Gang.

No transcript this week, but enjoy the show!

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Margaret (Maggie) Lewis, professor of law at Seton Hall University and veteran Taiwan observer, and Paul Heer, former national intelligence officer for East Asia in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) under the Obama administration. Both were members of the Council on Foreign Relations task force on U.S.-Taiwan policy, which produced a report titled “U.S.-Taiwan Relations in a New Era: Responding to a More Assertive China.” Both also wrote dissents, included in the report, about some of its findings and recommendations. They discuss what they think the report got right — and what it got wrong.

01:01 – Introduction to the CFR’s report U.S.-Taiwan Relations in a New Era: Responding to a More Assertive China

05:09 – The mechanics of producing the report

06:46 – Areas of common consensus among participants

08:48 – What is the significance of the PLA’s centennial in 2027 in view of the CFR task force?

10:54 – Is the report too focused on the military at the expense of political, diplomatic, and economic considerations?

14:22 – Taiwanese perspectives in the report

16:36 – Strategic ambiguity and President Biden’s “gaffes” as a new baseline for U.S. declaratory policy

20:48 – The issue of deterrence: American and Chinese approaches

25:48 – What has the United States done to move the status quo in terms of the Taiwan issue?

41:06 – Is there evidence yet of Chinese preparation for a military action against Taiwan?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Maggie: Fever: The Hunt for Covid’s Origin by John Sudworth (podcast)

Paul: Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan

Kennan: A life between Worlds by Frank Costigliola

Kaiser: The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline by Yasheng Huang

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back Jeremy Daum, senior research scholar in law and senior fellow at the Paul Tsai China Law Center. Jeremy has a well-deserved reputation as a debunker of myths and misperceptions about China. This time, he takes on the much-discussed “overseas police stations,” and examines how they are — and aren’t — related to China’s transnational repression.

01:03 – The overview of the investigation on Chinese overseas police stations

06:19 – The disparity between the press release and the actual charges against the investigated Chinese individuals

08:48 – The functions of so-called Chinese secret police stations in the U.S.

11:10 – What was wrong with the report written by Safeguard Defenders?

16:57 – What is being national in the aforementioned policies?

19:22 – Evidence of a link between physical presence with transnational repression or repatriation of criminals

26:29 – Is the media narrative regarding popular myths about China slowly changing?

30:22 – Other governments’ views on and actions towards Chinese police stations

31:38 – Tactics used on the return of alleged criminals to China

34:11 – An update on the topic of draft regulations on Generative AI

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations: Jeremy: I’m a Virgo, a television show on Amazon Prime.

Kaiser: A perfect family dinner for the summer: An easy recipe for spicy salmon/tuna

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This week on Sinica, UPenn legal scholar Neysun Mahboubi talks about his recently-concluded trip back to China — his first time back since the outbreak of the pandemic. Neysun talks about the importance of in-person, face-to-face scholarly exchange, and despite concerns over the more restrictive political space in China, sounds a hopeful note about what the restoration of in-person exchange might mean for the future of U.S.-China relations.

05:02 – Neysun Mahboubi’s YouTube-based initiatives on the U.S.-China relations

10:15 – The changes in Beijing in recent years

13:49 – The recently observed growing reticence of Chinese people to speak up, and the third-rail topics

16:50 – The effect of Chinese administrative handling of the pandemic on people’s trust

25:01 – What is the view of Chinese liberal intellectuals on the role of the U.S. in the worsening U.S.-China relations?

28:29 – Have the Biden administration’s recent efforts to thaw the U.S.-China relations been well received by the Chinese side?

32:48 – The future of scholarly exchanges from China and the U.S. in light of the pandemic and escalating political tensions

40:13 – The Ukraine War from the perspective of Chinese intellectuals

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations: Neysun: To Live, directed by Zhang Yimou

Kaiser: The Status Kuo, an American politics substack by Jay Kuo

Mentioned: To Live: A Novel by Yu Hua (translated by Michael Berry)

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Elsa Kania, a Ph.D. candidate in Harvard University's Department of Government and adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security who researches China's military strategy, defense innovation, and emerging technologies. Elsa joins the show to discuss China’s push for Military-Civil Fusion, debunking some of the myths about the program that U.S. pundits and policymakers have imbibed.

03:54 – Did the concept of Military-Civil Fusion start with the leadership of Xi Jinping?

06:48 What were the barriers to MCF’s successful implementation before Xi’s leadership?

09:50 – The comparison between attempts and successes of MCF in China and the U.S.

15:39 – Areas of focus of China’s MCF. Which areas offer the most significant possibility for success?

20:17 – A look at the perceived legal obligation of Chinese companies to participate in MCF

24:59 – The collaboration between Chinese and American researchers in light of MCF

31:00 – The awareness of Chinese policy-makers of the sensitivities associated with MCF by other nations

34:56 – Does MCF have the same place of prominence in the Biden administration

that it did in the Trump’ administration?

37:20 – How should we approach the policy of MCF?

42:27 – Is the U.S. trying to “out-China” China?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Elsa: Translation State by Ann Leckie

Kaiser: A recipe for making homemade nuomi cha / genmai cha — green tea with roasted glutinous rice

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With Secretary of State Antony Blinken's two days of meetings in Beijing just concluded, Kaiser spoke with Dennis Wilder, managing director for the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University, where he also serves as an assistant professor of practice in Asian Studies in the School of Foreign Service. Dennis was the National Security Council's director for China from 2004-2005 and then served as the NSC special assistant to the president and senior director for East Asian affairs from 2005 to 2009. From 2009 to 2015 Dennis served as the senior editor of the President’s Daily Brief, the worldwide intelligence update produced under the auspices of the director of national intelligence. He also served from 2015 to 2016 as the CIA’s deputy assistant director for East Asia and the Pacific. Who better to give an informed take on Secretary Blinken's diplomatic mission?

We'll get the transcript and the rest of the show notes up later in the week. Look for it on the TheChinaProject.com website.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Keyu Jin, associate professor of economics at LSE, who talks about her new book, The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism, a wide-ranging, ambitious, and accessible book that explains the unique Chinese political economy, emphasizing both its successes to date and how it must change to meet the challenges to come.

01:01 – An overview of the book The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism by Keyu Jin

09:22 – Is the criticism about being pro-China justified?

14:25 – The element of culture in the Chinese economy

27:56 – What is the mayor economy and what are its pros and cons?

38:00 – The power of the Chinese state to affect changes in the macroeconomy

42:52 – The modern state-owned enterprise and its purpose

47:39 – China’s financial system – the disparity between China’s GDP growth and its abyssmal stock market

52:07 – The current situation with the real estate market: Is the bubble going to pop?

1:02:03 – Pros and cons of the growth of the shadow banking sector in China

1:06:32 – The position of China in the global trading system

1:13:52 – How does China respond to technology restrictions in key areas such as semiconductor manufacturing?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Keyu: When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010 by Tony Judt

Kaiser: 1776 (Musical)

Mentioned: The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism by Keyu Jin

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with David Ownby, the University of Montreal historian who runs the excellent ReadingTheChinaDream.com website — a trove of translations of writings by mainstream Chinese intellectuals. David talks about the website’s mission and about tells about his recent three-week trip to Beijing and Shanghai, in which he met with many of the people he translates on his site. Many of them are profoundly disillusioned with the leadership’s handling of the end of Zero-COVID, he found.

03:38 – Genesis of the project Reading the Chinese Dream

09:32 – The choice of intellectuals being translated

14:11 – An overview of common ideological denominators for the New Confucians, the Liberals, and the New Left.

24:19 – The emerging groups as a direct response to certain phenomena happening in the West

25:58 – How did we fail to understand the intellectual life in China?

30:30 – An overview of David’s recent trip to China

35:12 – How does the post-COVID reality in China affect Chinese intellectuals?

45:34 – Are we observing a turning point in the intellectual community and its relationship with the Chinese government?

47:41 – The attitudes of Chinese intellectuals towards the U.S.

56:04 – Will the negativity currently observed among Chinese intellectuals a temporary or enduring issue?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

David: Ties by Domenico Starnone, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

Kaiser: The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson

Mentioned: Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri

Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen

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With the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue kicking off in Singapore on Friday, June 2, Kaiser chats with the organizer’s managing director for Asia, James Crabtree, about the history, structure, and significance of this Asian answer to the Munich Security Conference, James, who joined the Institute for International Strategic Studies in 2018, offers a great sneak-peek and a curtain raiser on the three-day event, which will bring ministers and secretaries of defense together from all over the region and beyond.05:54 – What are the differences between the Munich Security Conference and the Shangri-La Dialogue?10:21 – Notable past Shangri-La Dialogues14:42 – Who are the guests of this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue?19:53 – The programming of the Shangri-La Dialogue26:48 – The Chinese participation in the event and the background of China-US and Sino-Japanese relations34:16 – European delegations in recent years attending the event and the challenges they face37:42 – The connotation of Indo-Pacific as opposed to the Asia-Pacific41:17 – The dynamics on the axis China-India-US and a multipolar vision for Southeast Asia52:33 – The current intentions for the bilateral relationship between the United States and China?A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.Recommendations:James: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark; and The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life by John le CarréKaiser: A Perfect Spy: A Novel by John le Carré Mentioned:The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

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This week on Sinica, Harvard’s eminent sinologist William Kirby joins Kaiser to talk about his book Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China,and to share his views on the state of higher education in China and the U.S，03:12 – Wissenschaft and the German contribution to the creation of the modern research university06:30 – The decreasing number of Chinese students willing to study in the U.S. and the defunding of American public universities12:17 – What is the current state of higher education in China?18:19 – Continuities between the old imperial civil service examination system and the current higher education system in China23:08 – The state of Chinese universities before the Cultural Revolution29:23 – How China revived higher education on the model of American universities in the early years of Reform and Opening33:00 – Why does China maintain the gaokao examination despite its great unpopularity?41:38 – Differences between the two leading universities in China: Peking University and Tsinghua University44:00 – Institutional entrepreneurship at Tsinghua University50:01 – The origins of Nanjing University and how it evolved over the years57:21 – The importance of governance and management in the example of the University of Hong Kong1:05:23 – What is the future of the joint programs between American and Chinese universities?A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.Recommendations:Bill:Made in Hong Kong: Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization by Peter E. HamiltonThe Dean of Shandong: The Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University by Daniel A. BellThe Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be by Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner9,000 Years of Wine: A World History by Rod PhillipsRed Mandarin Dress: An Inspector Chen Novelby Qiu XiaolongKaiser: Adventures of Horatio Hornblower by Entertainment RadioMentioned: Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China by William C. Kirby

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser is joined by The China Project's CEO Bob Guterma, who just so happens to have served at Chief Compliance Officer (and later Managing Director for Europe and the U.S.) for the expert network Capvision. Capvision, as listeners may well be aware, was the Shanghai-based company whose offices in China were raided by Chinese law enforcement, resulting in the detention of two experts for allegedly passing on military secrets to foreign companies. Does this signal a major crackdown on consultancies? And what are the implications for foreign businesses in China? Bob shares his insights — and things are more complicated than you might think.03:39 – Background information on Capvision10:29 – The national security concerns in the Capvision case.12:27 – Is there a connection between the case of Capvision with the previous cases of Bain and Mintz?20:13 – Is there changing optics for Western companies doing business in China?22:13 – The possible connection between the Capvision case and the Espionage Law32:22 – The context of bigger changes in the past three years in China in light of achieving government goals.34:34 – The inner workings of a compliance officer in expert networks36:44 – Media outlets’ misconceptions and a lack of diligent research regarding the Capvision caseA complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.Recommendations:Bob: Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav SmilKaiser: Mr. Bungle’s debut album Mr. Bungle

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Andrew Stokols, a Ph.D. researcher at MIT who has been studying the “techno-natural utopia” that the Chinese government is now building a hundred kilometers southwest of Beijing: Xiong’an. Andrew breaks down why he sees it as an urban manifestation of the fundamental ideas embodied in Xi Jinping’s ideological vision for China.02:02 - Xiong’an New Area as a bold vision for China07:36 - Planned stages for the development of Xiong’an. Milestones in 2035 and 2050.12:03 - Cities as expressions of political ideas15:32 - Different facets of the Xiong’an as the legacy of Xi Jinping20:03 - The elements of ecological civilization intended to be built into the new city27:41 - Technologies employed with the intention of making Xiong’an a smart city31:56 - The idea of incentivizing the digital yuan into the city of Xiong’an34:55 - Xiong’an as an expression of Chineseness40:05 - How is Xiong’an discussed in the English-language press outside of China?47:59 - Approaches to technology and nature in Western and Chinese discourses. Theconcept of techno-naturalism.A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.comRecommendations:Andrew: The Institutional Foundation of Economic Development by Shiping TangKaiser: Five Families by Selwyn RaabMentioned:Andrew’s article on Xiong’an: Chinas techno-natural utopia: A deep dive into Xiong’anShanghai Future: Modernity Remade by Anna Greenspan

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This week on Sinica, an Earth Day special: Kaiser chats with Marilyn Waite, managing director of the Climate Finance Fund; Alex Wang, a UCLA law professor who specializes in China climate and environmental law; and Deborah Seligsohn, a political scientist at Villanova University who served as the Environment, Science, Technology and Health Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. This episode was taped live on Thursday, April 20, as a webinar from The China Project.

5:24 – Taking stock: Where have we come since the first Earth Day in 1970?

14:24 – Is the Inflation Reduction Act an unalloyed good for the environment and climate?

17:17 – The good and the bad of China’s recent record on climate

20:45 – The unmet need for climate finance globally, and what China’s PbOC is doing right

27:54 – Should we roll our eyes when China speaks of “ecological civilization”?

31:57 – Embracing the JEDI approach in addressing climate change

35:30 – Can the U.S. and China harness competition to drive better climate outcomes?

39:54 – Why pushing each other won’t work, and cooperation is still needed

45:15 – Addressing hard-to-abate sectors like agrifood

50:30 – Balancing cooperation and competition between the U.S. and China on climate

A complete transcript of this episode is available at TheChinaProject.com.

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Mike Chinoy, the legendary award-winning TV newsman who helmed CNN in Beijing for many critical years. Mike talks about the video documentary series and accompanying book Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic, for which he interviewed about 130 journalists whose careers spanned an 80-year period, from the 1940s to the present.

04:08 – The genesis of the Assignment China project

11:15 – Editorial decisions: What was included, and what wasn’t

16:13 – The big takeaways for Mike on finishing this project

25:13 – The role of contingency and the observer effect

32:52 – How Tiananmen really made CNN and changed the future of cable news

36:30 – Tough ethical calls in the reporting of China

42:42 – Structural biases in American reporting on China…

50:50 – …and what news consumers can do to adjust for those baked-in biases

52:54 – Does where the reporters are actually determine what the story is?

1:02:17 – What went wrong with TV news?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Mike: Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai by Matti Friedman

Jeremy: From the Jewish Provinces: Selected Storiesby Fradl Shtok, translated by Jordan Finkin and Allison Schachter

Kaiser: Father’s Laszlo Ladany’s “Ten Commandments” on China-watching, and playing around with ChatGPT 4

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This week on Sinica, Kishore Mahbubani, who served as Singapore’s UN Ambassador and has written extensively on ASEAN and the U.S.-China rift, returns to the show to discuss his recent essay in Foreign Affairs, and to advocate for the pragmatic approach that’s held ASEAN together for over five decades of continuous peace and growing prosperity.

4:36 – Kishore talks about Macron’s state visit to China and the controversy around his comments in media interviews

8:53 – How the Ukraine War has highlighted divisions between the West and the Global South

11:45 – Pragmatism: is this a euphemism for amorality?

15:26 – ASEAN as a template for multipolarity

19:38 – Cultural relativism, moral absolutism, and the shift in the American intelligentsia

24:56 – How does ASEAN handle specific issues of U.S.-China tension?

29:12 – Investment and trade: China and ASEAN vs. U.S and ASEAN — guns and butter

40:04 – The Belt and Road Initiative and American attitudes toward it

44:10 – Kishore’s “three rules” for U.S. engagement with ASEAN

49:49 – China’s recent diplomatic efforts: Saudi-Iran, and the Ukraine War

52:34 – How receptive has the American strategic class been to Kishore’s ideas?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Kishore: John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

Kaiser: The Silk Roads: A New History of the Worldby Peter Frankopan

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This week on Sinica, something different: Kaiser asks over a dozen scholars of various facets of China studies to talk about their work and make some recommendations! You’ll hear from a variety of scholars, from MA students to tenured professors, talking about a bewildering range of fascinating work they’re doing. Enjoy!

3:00 – Kristin Shi-Kupfer — recommendations: this essay (in Chinese) by Teng Biao on Chinese Trump supporters; Han Rongbin’s work on digital society; and Yang Guobin’s work on digital expression on the internet in China.

7:48 – Lev Nachman — recommendation: Ian Rowen, One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism; and the city of Taichung, and especially its night market food on Yizhong Street and the Fang Chia Night market.

9:27 – Lin Zhang — recommendation: Victor Seow, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia; and Gary Gertle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the 20th Century

15:32 – Maura Dykstra — recommendation: Richard von Glahn’s contribution to the Oxford History of Modern China about registration in imperial China

19:00 – Jonathan Elkobi — a Rand Corporation study on economic cooperation between Israel and China; the fusion band Snarky Puppy

22:22 – Seiji Shirane — Seediq Bale (Warriors of the Rainbow)and Lust, Caution

25:18 – Zhu Qian — Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the 20th Century, and two films: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness and Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin

31:23– Fabio Lanza — Sarah Mellors Rodriguez, Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911–2021; and Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital by Leopoldina Fortunati

33:04 – Catherine Tsai —:Hiroko Matsuda’s The Liminality of the Japanese Empire

34:46– Lena Kaufmann — Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial Chinaand other works by Francesca Bray

39:05 – Josh Freeman — Works of Uyghur poetry by Ghojimuhemmed Muhemmed, Ekhmetjan Osman, Tahir Hamut Izgil, Perhat Tursun, Dilkhumar Imin, Abide Abbas Nesrin, Erkan Qadir, and Muyesser Abdul’ehed Hendan.

41:32 – Susan McCarthy — Joanna Handlin Smith, The Art of Doing Good: Charity in Late Ming China

49:18 – Brian DeMare — William Hinton, Fanshen

50:47 – Juliet Lu — Maria Repnikova, Chinese Soft Power, and Samuel L. Jackson reading Adam Mansbach’s Go the F–k to Sleep

58:29 – Sabina Knight — Wu Ming-Yi, The Man with the Compound Eyes, translated by Darryl Sterk

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Chris Marquis, a professor at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School, and formerly at Cornell’s business school, about the book he co-authored with Kunyuan Qiao, Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise. In it, they examine how even in China’s private sector, socialization into the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party among some entrepreneurs has left an enduring legacy that is visible in some of the ways Chinese private enterprises conduct business.

3:35 – Motivation for Mao and Markets

5:34 – Enduring elements of Maoism in contemporary Chinese enterprise

12:35 – Variation among “Maoist” entrepreneurs

20:40 – Differentiating superficial and authentic Maoist entrepreneurship

35:04 – Is today’s China ideological or simply nationalistic?

39:17 – Xi’s Maoist revival: real or imagined?

44:30 – Chris’s transition from business and sociology to Chinese politics

47:09 – Chris’s experience as a Thousand Talents recipient

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Chris: The Entrepreneurial State and The Big Con by Mariana Mazzucato

Kaiser: This calendar of lunar phases from theoriginallunarphase.com, and Mongolian salty milk tea, or sūūtei tsai which is easy to make at home

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This week, a bonus episode to keep you caught up on the week’s biggest China story: Xi Jinping’s two days of meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Maria Repnikova, a Latvian-born native Russian speaker who is also fluent in Chinese and who teaches Chinese politics and communications at Georgia State University, joins the show again to talk about what each side hoped for, what each side got, and the asymmetries of power on conspicuous display in Moscow.

1:53 – Does Beijing look at the Ukraine War and still see the United States, as Maria argued last year?

3:06 – How Xi and Putin spoke to their own domestic audiences, and to each other’s

4:43 – How the Xi-Putin meeting was viewed in the Global South

8:10 – Why was the elephant in the room go mostly unremarked upon?

10:27 – Junior partner, senior partner, and “optionality”

16:27 – Did Putin come away disappointed from the meeting?

18:03 – How did China’s peace framework come off in the West vs. in China?

21:11 – What might the United States have done differently — and what might it still do to prevent China from drifting too close to Russia?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Maria: Solomon Elusoji, Travelling with Big Brother: A Reporter’s Junket in China

Kaiser: The Polish progressive rock band Riverside, and its latest album ID.Entity

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes Tuvia Gering of Israel’s Institute of National Security Studies, where he focuses on China’s relations with Israel and other countries of the Middle East. Tuvia breaks down the agreement to normalize relations between Riyadh and Tehran, which Beijing brokered during secret talks that were only revealed, along with the fruit they bore, on March 10.

6:05 – How was China able to broker the Saudi-Iran normalization?

17:00 – Notable commitments from Saudi, Iran, and China

25:01 – China’s non-energy interests in and engagement with the Middle East

29:03 – Reactions from world capitals

39:28 – Saudi’s balancing act between U.S. security partnership and engagement with China

49:52 – Implications for China as a mediator in Ukraine and other international conflict zones

52:44 – Overview of China-Israel relations

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com

Recommendations:

Tuvia: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard on YouTube

Kaiser: The Venture of Islam by Marshall G. S. Hodgson

Mentioned:

Tuvia’s Discourse Power Substack

The China-Global South Podcast

Tuvia’s interview with retired PLA Colonel Zhou Bo

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes Taisu Zhang, professor of law at Yale University, who discusses his recent work on the expansion of the administrative state down to the subdistrict and neighborhood level — changes that are far-reaching, and likely permanent. They also discuss a recent essay in Foreign Affairsi n which Taisu argued that Beijing is shifting away from “performance legitimacy” as the foundation of political rule, and more toward legality — not to be confused with the rule of law.

3:29 – Nationalism as legitimacy, and its grounding in economic performance

7:45 – The CCP’s unique approach to “legal legitimacy”

21:28 – Evidence from the Two Meetings, or 兩會 liǎnghuì

35:56 – Chinese Administrative Expansion in the Xi Jinping Era

49:40 – The role of the anti-corruption campaign in expanding local government authority

56:18 – Changes in local governance after COVID

1:01:27 – Who were the dàbái?

1:04:10 – Technology in China’s post-pandemic power structure

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Taisu: The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber; The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development by Yuhua Wang; Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State by Maura Dykstra; The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu; and The Lower Yangzi Trilogy by Ge Fei

Kaiser: Kaiser: Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republicby Mike Chinoy; and the many uses of beeswax

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A second full episode this week for you Sinica listeners! Jude Blanchette joins to talk about the House Select Committee on United States Competition with the Chinese Communist Party, and all that is wrong with it, from its framing of the CCP as an “existential threat” to its focus on the CCP, and how all of this adds up to an embarrassing moral panic that distracts from the serious issues the U.S. confronts when it comes to China.

4:37 – What’s wrong with the Select Committee’s framing of China as an “existential threat,” and why the first hearing was an embarrassment

9:01 – The current moment as a moral panic over China

12:09 – Domestic political drivers of U.S. China policy

15:04 – Why the United States versus the Chinese Communist Party is the wrong framing too

22:46 – Is this more like McCarthyism — or antisemitism?

28:58 – The downstream effects of U.S. tech containment policy toward China

42:01 – The advantage of simplistic, Manichean messaging

46:15 – Prioritizing U.S. issues with China: why Confucius Institutes and TikTok are so far down the to-do list, and what really matters48:59 – And what are the real issues that deserve priority?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com

Recommendations:

Jude: Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon by Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Headlam, from Audible

*Kaiser:* This podcast interview with Angela Rasmussen, the virologist who has been in the front lines fighting back against the resurgent lab leak theory, from the Slate What Next: TBD podcast

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Lulu Chen, who has reported on tech in China for over a decade and is the author of the book Influence Empire: The Inside Story of Tencent and China’s Tech Ambition. It’s a fascinating look at not only Tencent but at the overall internet sector in China, focusing on the travails and the triumphs of some of the most consequential Chinese internet entrepreneurs.

5:31 – Motivation for and background of Influence Empire

10:15 – Ma Huateng and Martin Lau at Tencent

19:56 – How the Chinese internet sector went from copying to innovating

30:59 – Cutthroat company cultures

33:20 – What made Allen Zhang successful?

37:25 – The Tencent-Meituan food delivery coup

45:21 – Tencent’s position in the online game industry

51:58 – Understanding China’s 2020-2022 tech crackdown

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Lulu: The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits and Encounters by Gay Talese

Kaiser:Cunk on Earth on Netflix

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy speak with Henry Sanderson, a former AP and Bloomberg reporter who was based in China for many years, about his book Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green — a book that reminds us of the very ugly fact that the metals that are needed to make electric vehicle batteries need to be dug out of the earth, and processed in ways that are anything but environmentally friendly. Henry talks about China’s outsize role in lithium, cobalt, and nickel processing, as well as some promising chemistries that allow for EV batteries without some of the problematic metals.

2:49 – China’s role in the EV battery supply chain

9:36 – Global Chinese investments in lithium mines

14:04 – Is cobalt a necessary evil?

18:56 – Can NGO pressure induce better corporate behavior in EV battery supply chains?

21:28 – How Indonesia used its nickel resources to attract Chinese FDI

26:17 – China’s efforts to innovate around scarce metals

32:08 – China’s metal processing industry: State- or market-driven?

36:06 – Lessons from Europe’s battery industry

40:42 – Electrification of two-wheeled vehicles

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Jeremy: London Review of Books

Henry: The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir by Karen Cheung

Kaiser: Tracking the People’s Daily newsletter by Manoj Kewalramani

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It’s been one year now since Vladimir Putin launched his assault on Ukraine, and China has sought to maintain the same difficult, awkward straddle across a difficult year. Did Beijing’s efforts to project the impression that it had distanced itself from Russia in the wake of the Party Congress mean anything? And how should the U.S. manage its expectations of what China can or will do? Evan Feigenbaum, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, joins us again as he did a year ago. We’re also joined by his colleague Alexander (Sasha) Gabuev, who is a senior fellow at Carnegie, who headed the Carnegie Moscow Center until recently.

4:37 – Are Beijing’s actions surprising?

7:34 – The nature of China-Russia relations

15:45 – How has Beijing concretely supported Russia?

22:07 – Did Beijing know Putin was going to invade?

29:48 – European perspectives on the “No Limits partnership”

37:02 – Beijing’s assessment of Russia’s military performance

39:07 – What Beijing has learned from Russia’s invasion

46:47 – What carrots can the United States offer China?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Sasha: Writing From Ukraine: Fiction, Poetry and Essays since 1965by Mark Andryczyk

Evan: The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War,1916-1917 by Philip Zelikow

Kaiser: Jessica Chen Weiss on The Ezra Klein Show and The Problem With Jon Stewart; “Avoiding Catastrophe Will Be the True Test of Fractious U.S.-China Relations,” an op-ed in the Financial Times by Jude Blanchette

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Raffaello Pantucci, co-author of the 2022 book Sinostan: China’s Inadvertent Empire, which examines China’s presence in Central Asia. Based on extensive travel and interviews undertaken both before and after the tragic murder of his co-author, Alexandros Petersen, in 2014, the book is a highly readable if difficult to categorize melange of analysis and anecdote, history and travelogue, and it paints a complex portrait of China’s extensive efforts to build out a network of commercial and cultural ties throughout the pivotal region.

3:48 – Remembering the late Alexandros Petersen

9:35 – Xinjiang’s importance in Beijing’s Central Asia policy

13:36 – Central Asian states’ reactions to Xinjiang internment camps

24:39 – Assessing China’s soft power in Central Asia

37:10 – BRI: strategic calculus or ad-hoc scramble?

43:32 – Evolution of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization

49:45 – China’s characterization of terrorism

54:45 – The SCO today and China’s growing security footprint

1:03:03 – China in Afghanistan

1:10:36 – Current status of the BRI

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Raffaello: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan; The Geographical Pivot of History by Halford Mackinder

Kaiser: Volt Rush by Henry Sanderson

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This week, we’ve got a short show focused on the Chinese balloon that became the obsessive focus of American attention from Thursday through Sunday, February 5, when an F-22 shot it out of the sky off of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Gerard DiPippo, a senior fellow with the Economics Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, joins to discuss the incident and its potential fallout.

We’ll have the transcript for you on the website in a day or so.

Recommendations:

Gerard: The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present, by John Pomfret

Kaiser: Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relationsby Pete Millwood

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This week on Sinica, our live recording from the Rizzoli Bookstore in the Flatiron district of Manhattan with the legendary Ian Johnson, who has covered China for a host of publications spanning 35 years. Ian, who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, offers his analysis of media coverage, shares some pet peeves in the way China is reported, and offers a sneak peek at some of the themes of his forthcoming book.

4:31 – Beijing’s shifting diplomatic messaging

12:10 – U.S. media coverage of China’s COVID-19 policies

14:45 – Structural biases of reporting on/in China

24:05 – Reporting on China through social media

29:46 – Resisting and recasting the blob’s China narrative

39:52 – How think tanks affect China discourse in the U.S.

43:03 – The importance of history to the CCP

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Jeremy: Paul French’s Ultimate China Bookshelf, a new feature at The China Project

Ian: Golden Age by Wáng Xiaǒbō 王小波, translated by Yan Yan; Blue Note jazz LP re-issues

Kaiser: The audiobook of Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, narrated by Julia Whelan and Edoardo Ballerini

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When the National Bureau of Statistics recently revealed that China’s population had shrunk in 2022 for the first time in 60 years, conventional wisdom predicted that China was headed for catastrophe, as its workforce shrank, its pension coffers dried up, and its healthcare system grew overtaxed. Not so fast, says Bert Hofman, who spent 22 years in Asia with the World Bank, focused chiefly on China. Now a professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Government at the National University of Singapore, Bert offers a deeply-informed take on the challenges China does face — and how it might address them without suffering economic stagnation.

4:24 – Why population decline isn’t necessarily bad

5:55 – Why are low birth rates a challenge for China?

7:49 – How China can offset the “demographic tax” of population decline

13:40 – Is declining investment such a bad thing for China?

18:27 – Common prosperity and the pension system

23:45 – Challenges and solutions for healthcare reform

27:41 – The logic of beginning with fiscal reform

33:18 – The shortfalls of focusing on raising fertility rates

38:06 – What can China learn from other countries?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com

Recommendations:

Bert: China Reconnects by Wang Gungwu; The Last of Us on HBO Max

Kaiser: Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

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This week on Sinica, we welcome back Deborah Seligsohn, assistant professor of political science at Villanova University. Debbi spent October 2022 through early January 2023 in Shanghai and Beijing, experiencing quarantine, testing, and lockdown at firsthand — and witnessing the protests and the sudden reopening. As a close observer of public health issues, she lends valuable perspective to what happened in these critical months.

8:13 – Overview of how zero-COVID impacted different demographics in China

17:54 – Which level of government was held accountable during the zero-COVID protests?

23:03 – Factors that contributed to the breakout of protests

29:05 – Rationale behind the sudden lifting of COVID regulations

38:17 – Assessing Beijing’s failure to effectively expand its medical capacity

45:45 – Efficacy of Chinese vaccines

49:45 – Understanding poor vaccination rate amongst the elderly population

55:45 – Breakdown of China’s COVID situation after the relaxation of zero-COVID measures

1:03:32 – Unpacking the new negative test requirements imposed on Chinese travelers

1:09:56 – Is China under-reporting its death rate?

A transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Debbi: two-part interview with Jesse Jenkins from the Volts Podcast, detailing the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS act, and the Infrastructure Bill

Kaiser: Demon Copperhead, the latest novel by Barbara Kingsolver. A coming of age story set in Southern Appalachia.

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This week on Sinica, we’re proud to introduce you to Susan St. Denis, who joined The China Project full-time recently after running the China Vibe Official TikTok channel for The China Project for the last several months. Kaiser and Susan talk about what people are getting wrong about TikTok, the challenges of presenting complex issues in this medium, and much more!

1:01 – Introducing The China Project’s official TikTok channel: China Vibe TikTok

08:25 – Challenging the assumption that TikTok content is inherently dumbed down

12:13 – Why Susan’s content was a good fit for The China Project

14:30 – Unique challenges of covering China on TikTok

19:16 – Providing a balanced account within TikTok’s landscape of extreme views on China

21:52 – How different generations view China

28:35 – How to access Susan’s China TikTok content

29:39 – How legitimate are the security and privacy concerns surrounding TikTok?

A transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations –

Susan: Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China by Han Suyin; The China America Student Conference (www.iscdc.org)

Kaiser: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford; and an ambivalent endorsement of the Conqueror series by Conn Iggulden.

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This week on Sinica, check out the first episode of the latest season of “Strangers in China,” with host Clay Baldo!

The 2022 Shanghai lockdown came to Clay’s neighborhood early and caught him off-guard. Struggling with his mental health, Clay documents how lockdown works on a granular level giving listeners an audio tour of his neighborhood as it plunges into the uncertainty of all the minutiae of day-to-day life living under the control of the apparatuses that shut down an entire city for several months. The boredom, the stress, the terror. He documents clashes with local bureaucracy and the ingenuity of the people of Shanghai who had to live through these dark and strange times. Clay ventures out into a city as it’s about to enter the full city lockdown and gives listeners a sense of what a city looks like before it’s irrevocably changed.

Music credits:

Csus – https://soundcloud.com/csus

Moss Heim- https://soundcloud.com/mossheim-experimental/cutup-test-cycle-7000

Trey – https://soundcloud.com/tristan-phipps-1/trance

Jaies – https://soundcloud.com/jaiess

Bary – https://soundcloud.com/bary_is_cool

Ginger pitcher – https://soundcloud.com/gingerpitcherfredfroh

TDP-Experimental – https://soundcloud.com/user-99078702

Xxiuk – https://soundcloud.com/xxiuk

Lakey Inspired – https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired

TazLazuli – https://soundcloud.com/tazlazuli

Terri skills – https://soundcloud.com/beatz-by-terri-skillz

Lofee – https://soundcloud.com/lofeetunes

Dr3am – https://soundcloud.com/dr3am-official

Purrple Cat – https://soundcloud.com/purrplecat

Ye Old Experimental Junk – https://soundcloud.com/ye-old-experimental-junk

Le gang – https://soundcloud.com/thisislegang

Obani – https://soundcloud.com/obani

Jozwyn – https://soundcloud.com/jozwyn

MCV – https://soundcloud.com/just-chillin-654995634

Works consulted

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-60893070

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-12/shanghai-residents-remain-largely-under-lockdown-despite-easing

https://isdp.eu/publication/xi-jinping-and-the-administrative-hierarchy-and-subdivisions-in-china/

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/elizabethperry/files/managed_campaigns_-_proofs.pdf

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1178528.shtml

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1184356.shtml

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/694299

https://elibrary.law.psu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1209&context=psilr

https://www.smh.com.au/world/pocket-of-poverty-the-new-shanghai-has-left-behind-20121109-293dl.html

https://www.scmp.com/video/china/3187061/shanghais-old-west-gate-neighbourhood-emptied-demolition-and-redevelopment

https://academic.oup.com/columbia-scholarship-online/book/20259/chapter-abstract/179324873?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

The work of Michel Foucault

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We proudly present Episode 1 of the new season of Strangers in China, part of the Sinica Network from The China Project. In this season, host Clay Baldo provides an intimate look at the lockdown in Shanghai, from the foreboding that preceded it through the harrowing days of the lockdown itself.

Be sure to subscribe to the show, too! Just look up Strangers in China in your podcast app of choice and hit subscribe.

2:21 – A preview of this season of Strangers in China

8:23 – The Shanghai fāngcāng方舱 and emergence of spontaneous mass gatherings

13:28 – Explaining the role of neighborhood committees/ jūwěihuì 居委会 in China

18:39 – The exploration of mental health throughout this podcast

24:21 – Clay’s process in producing the podcast

28:06 – The editorial choice to not dub over Chinese speakers

31:29 – Can the protests like the one that broke out on Urumqi Lu emerge again?

37:15 – Examples of strong group solidarity during the lockdown

43:35 – Clay’s thoughts on the recent loosening of restrictions

A transcript of this podcast will be available soon at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Clay: 3 Shanghai fashion Instagram accounts to follow – Windowsen (@windowsen), Susu, (@_su.su.su.su). Lexi (@jing_sen_); and the book Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.

Kaiser: The Long Shipsby Frans Bengtsson

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Rebecca Kuang (who writes under the name R.F. Kuang), the author of the best-selling historical fantasy novel Babel. Set in the 1830s in England, the novel’s Chinese-born protagonist sets out to prevent a war with China over the opium trade. It’s a novel about the industrial revolution, labor activism, revolution, and — surprisingly — language, etymology, and translation.

2:28 – On Rebecca’s own connections to China and her anxieties about losing the Chinese language

8:27 – What historical insights Rebecca hoped her readers would take away from Babel

14:37 – Parallels between the U.K. of the early 19th century and the U.S. of the early 21st

20:26 – Refections on revolution and revolutionaries

25:48 – Silver working: the magic system in Babel and its relation to language

30:37 – Issues with translation theory presented in the book

38:04 – How Rebecca’s background in debate influenced her writing style

45:03 – Rebecca’s forthcoming novel Yellowface

A transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Rebecca: The film Banshees of Inisherinand other works by its director, Martin McDonagh, including the dark comedy In Bruges (2008).

Kaiser: The new novel by Cormac McCarthy The Passenger, and a review of it by James Wood in The New Yorker.

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This week on Sinica, Jude Blanchette (Freeman Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies) and Ryan Hass (Armacost Chair at the John L. Thornton Center at the Brookings Institute) join Kaiser to discuss their new essay in Foreign Affairs, “The Taiwan Long Game: Why the Best Solution Is No Solution.”

3:05 – Reconceptualizing Taiwan as “a strategic problem with a defense component”

6:00 – Why expanding the scope of the Taiwan issue beyond the military dimension should not be conflated with capitulation

13:34 – Has current U.S. policy abandoned preserving status quo cross-strait relations?

17:27 – Why has China refrained from the use of force thus far?

27:05 – China, U.S., and Taiwan’s heightened sense of urgency

31:22 – How Ukraine alters China’s decision calculus on Taiwan

36:44 – What pertinent challenges should the US be planning for rather than exclusively focusing on the threat of invasion?

43:58 – The issue with democracy vs authoritarianism framing

46:01 – The importance of considering Taiwanese agency when crafting US policy

48:40 – How the U.S. should define its one-China policy

53:19 – Opportunities for a detente between Washington and Beijing

A transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Ryan: “How We Would Know When China Is Preparing to Invade Taiwan,” by John Culver; the film White Christmas

Jude: The podcast In the Dark from American Public Media

Kaiser: “A Professor Who Challenges the Washington Consensus on China,” Ian Johnson’s piece in The New Yorker about Jessica Chen Weiss

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy welcome Diana Choyleva and Dinny McMahon, who recently published a report for the Wilson Center on China’s efforts to internationalize the Renminbi, its currency. Diana Choyleva is chief economist and founder of Enodo Economics, an independent macroeconomic forecasting consultancy she set up in 2016. Dinny McMahon is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of the book China’s Great Wall of Debt. Their report is called “China’s Quest for Financial Self-Reliance: How Beijing Plans to Decouple from the Dollar-Based Global Trading and Financial System.”

2:38 – The advantages the U.S. enjoys through the dollar’s global primacy

4:40 – How Beijing sees the dollar’s dominance as a strategic vulnerability

7:11 – Other countries who actively pursued internationalization of their currency

10:07 – International trust deficit regarding China’s currency

13:37 – Right-sizing China’s currency ambitions

15:13 – How China incentives increased demand for the RMB

24:19 – Are we currently at a critical turning point of currency displacement?

36:42 – The role of digital currency in China’s monetary strategy

43:42 – The BRI as a mechanism for expanding the circulation of the RMB

A transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Jeremy: This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay; Kay’s Anatomyby Adam Kay

Diana: Picking up dancing as a pastime; China: The Gathering Threat by Constantine Menges

Dinny: Lombard Street by Walter Bagehot

Kaiser: The Amazon miniseries The English

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Michael J. Mazarr, author of the book Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy...

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We’ve got a special bonus episode this week on the protests over the weekend of November 26th-27th in multiple cities around China. Joining Kaiser and...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser & Jeremy welcome Yuan Yang, a reporter for the Financial Times who was until recently covering technology in Beijing. Now based in...

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This week on Sinica, in lieu of the regular show we present a keynote address given by Evan Feigenbaum, VP for studies at the Carnegie...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Anne-Marie Slaughter, a leading American public intellectual who serves as president of New America and was Director of...

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This week on Sinica, our friends at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs invited us for a live show taping before a small group. Kaiser...

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This week on Sinica, Evan Osnos, staff writer for The New Yorker, joins hosts Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn to talk about his new piece on...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Susan Shirk, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Pacific and Research Professor and Chair of...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy are joined by Sue-Lin Wong, who until recently covered China for the Economist and hosted an eight-part podcast...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy were live in London with a very special guest: Carrie Gracie, whose career with the BBC spanned three...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Minister Xu Xueyuan, Deputy Chief of Mission at the PRC embassy in Washington, D.C. A few words about...

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This week on Sinica, we kick off the new network show, the China-Global South Podcast, with a conversation with the show’s hosts and co-founders of...

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This week on Sinica, Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin join the program to discuss their new book Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back University of Michigan political scientist Yuen Yuen Ang, who discusses a recent piece in the Journal of Democracy titled “How...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back the Cornell political scientist Jessica Chen Weiss, who is back in Ithaca after a year spent as a...

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy welcome back Tom Orlik, Bloomberg’s chief economist and author of the book China: The Bubble that Never...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy welcome Leroy Chiao, a NASA astronaut who flew three shuttle missions and served as commander of the International...

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser chats with Ali Wyne, senior analyst at the Eurasia Group’s global macro geopolitics practice and author of the...

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In a week dominated by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, Kaiser welcomes John Culver, who served as national intelligence officer for East...

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This week on Sinica, we offer listeners a sneak preview of one of the new shows coming soon to the Sinica Network: Café & Seda...

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser chats with Silvia Lindtner of the University of Michigan about her book Prototype Nation. In a wide-ranging conversation...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Paul Triolo, Senior VP for China and Technology Policy Lead at Dentons Global Advisors ASG, formerly and probably...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Villanova University historian Andrew Liu. Andy published an excellent essay in n+1 magazine in April that captured how...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Jing Tsu, John M. Schiff Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures & Comparative Literature at Yale University...

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Shelley Rigger of Davidson College returns to the show to talk Taiwan. She’s joined by Simona Grano, a sinologist...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with James (Jay) Carter, Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Jay...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back Dr. George Hu, a clinical psychologist based in Shanghai, who has a lot to say about the state...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes veteran Asia reporter Demetri Sevastopulo, who covers the U.S.-China relationship for the Financial Times. They discuss some of Demetri’s scoops...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Mark Leonard, founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and author most recently of The...

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This week on Sinica, Deborah Seligsohn returns to the show to talk about the sad state of U.S.-China scientific collaboration. As the Science Counselor at...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined again by Yawei Liu, Senior Director for China at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia; and by Danielle...

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser is joined by Manjari Chatterjee Miller, Senior Fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Marina Rudyak, assistant professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Heidelberg. She offers her unique perspective...

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The COVID lockdown in China’s biggest city, Shanghai, hasn’t been going exactly according to plan. This week on Sinica, we speak with our business editor...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Susan Thornton, former Acting Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and a veteran...

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This week on Sinica: Chén Dìngdìng 陈定定, professor of international relations at Jinan University in Guangzhou, offers his perspective on how Beijing views the war...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Maria Repnikova, assistant professor of global communications at Georgia State University, who recently published a short book under...

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser chats with Evan Feigenbaum, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former vice-chairman of...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Jeff Bader, who served as senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council during the first...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with William (Bill) Klein, who served as acting deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing from...

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser chats with Megan Walsh, journalist, literary critic, and author of the brand-new book The Subplot: What China Is Reading...

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser chats with Indiana University political scientist Jason Wu about his work on China’s ideological landscape. With so many...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Jeremy Daum, senior research scholar in law and senior fellow at Yale University’s Paul Tsai China Center. Jeremy...

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser welcomes back Rory Truex, who teaches politics and international affairs at Princeton. In a fascinating as-yet-unpublished paper, Rory...

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser welcomes back Dan Wang, technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, to talk about this year’s annual letter. Dan’s letters...

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What we think about China depends in large measure on how we think about China. As a nation of 1.4 billion people in the throes of world-historic change...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with David McCourt, associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis. For the last several years, David...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Damien Ma, managing director and co-founder of the Paulson Institute’s think-tank, MacroPolo. Damien discusses MacroPolo’s new forecast of...

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser chats with Eileen Guo and Jess Aloe, two members of the three-person team of reporters at the MIT...

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The recently-concluded Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) meeting in Dakar, Senegal, generated surprisingly little international press coverage — except for a few stories that seized...

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Highlights from our China Stories podcast: Launched in January 2021, it has published nearly 400 narrated pieces from the best English-language media outlets focused on China.

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, we bring you Part 2 of a conversation with Lizzi Lee, an economist turned China analyst, and Jude Blanchette...

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Recent polls conducted by organizations like Gallup and Pew have shown a precipitous decline in U.S. public opinion toward China. But how do the Chinese...

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This week on Sinica, a live show taped on November 11 at the fourth annual NEXTChina Conference at the China Institute in New York, featuring...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy discuss mental health in China with George Hu, a Shanghai-based clinical psychologist who serves as president of the...

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This week on Sinica, we present a deep-dive into the worldview of China’s leading Party theorist, Wáng Hùníng 王沪宁. Wang — the only member of...

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A warm Sinica welcome to our newest network member, the China Sports Insider Podcast! If it’s about sports and there’s a China angle, our hosts...

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This week on Sinica, we present a talk delivered on October 19 by Kaiser at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, as part of the...

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This week on Sinica: Did the Trump-era tariffs have their intended effects? In other words, did they prompt companies to pull up stakes in China...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Shelley Rigger, Brown professor of political science at Davidson College and author of the new book The Tiger...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Michael Davidson, a leading scholar on China’s environmental policy, who holds joint appointments at UC San Diego as...

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This week, Kaiser chats with Manfred Elfstrom, an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, Philosophy, and Political Science at the University of British Columbia...

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser welcomes former Acting Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs Susan Thornton to discuss a...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy welcome Lizzi Lee (李其 Lǐ Qi), SupChina contributor and host of the excellent Chinese-language YouTube channel Wall Street...

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Last month, the National Committee on United States-China Relations (NCUSCR) published a report for the Carnegie Corporation of New York titled “American International Relations and...

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If corruption is a drag on economic growth, why does China appear to have undergone some of its fastest growth during its periods of deepest...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with William (Bill) Overholt, senior research fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a veteran China-watcher whose...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with the Columbia historian Adam Tooze, who returns to the program a year after his first appearance. A prolific...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Peter Martin, a correspondent for Bloomberg based in Washington, D.C., about his book, China’s Civilian Army:...

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This week on Sinica, we’re pleased to present a conversation with Ambassador Huang Ping, a veteran Chinese diplomat who has been consul general of China’s...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Bill Bikales, who recently returned to the U.S. after 15 years in China as a developmental economist with...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Yiqing Xu, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University, about his work in applying modern methods...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Thomas Pepinsky and Jessica Chen Weiss, both professors of government at Cornell University, about their recent essay in...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Isabella Weber, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, about her new book, How...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by historian Timothy Cheek of the University of British Columbia, political scientist Elizabeth Perry of Harvard, and our...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Yong Cai, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel...

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Shortly after Deborah Seligsohn was last on Sinica, in April, the lab leak hypothesis seemed suddenly to gain traction — at least in American media...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Andrew Jones, a Helsinki-based reporter who over the last several years has secured a place as the go-to...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Yingyi Ma, an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse University and the author of the book Ambitious and...

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Have China and Russia entered into a de facto anti-American alliance? Is Russia, which in Soviet days was for a time the “older brother” to...

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Veteran China scholar Orville Schell has written a dozen books on China, but his latest book — which Schell published at the age of 80...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Margaret (Maggie) Lewis, a professor of law at Seton Hall University, about her work on the U.S. Department...

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Prince Han Fei, or Hán Fēizǐ 韓非子, is perhaps the most influential Chinese thinker that many Westerners have never heard of. With Jeremy hosting Sinica...

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This week on Sinica, after an eventful week of climate-change-focused meetings, including U.S. special climate envoy John Kerry’s trip to China, the U.S.-hosted Leaders Summit...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Arthur Jones and Steven Schwankert about their documentary The Six. The film, directed by Jones and...

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On April 16, PBS’s Great Performances will broadcast the world premiere of the documentary Beethoven in Beijing, which tells the story of classical music in...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Stephanie Studer, China correspondent for The Economist, who recently published a special report in the magazine about China’s...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Deborah Seligsohn, who served as the State Department’s Environment, Science, Technology and Health Counselor at the U.S. Embassy...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back Ryan Hass, the Michael H. Armacost Chair at the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institute...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with ex-venture capitalist Lillian Li, who moved to China from the U.K. last year and has been looking at...

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In August 2020, the CGTN anchorwoman Chéng Lěi 成蕾, an Australian citizen, was detained in Beijing. Six months later, she was formally arrested and charged...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to talk about...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Julie Klinger, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware’s Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences, about rare...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Wall Street Journal correspondent Te-Ping Chen to talk about her just-released collection of short fiction, Land of...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with three of the guests in a remarkable room on the drop-in voice chat app Clubhouse, which...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser talks with Dan Wang, a Shanghai-based analyst at research firm Gavekal Dragonomics, who also contributes a regular opinion column to...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Paul Heer about the conundrum of Taiwan — one of the thorniest and most fraught issues confronting the...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with the three authors of a new policy paper from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a relatively new...

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By the end of 2019, Chinese courts had uploaded some 80 million court cases to a massive, centralized database — a gold mine not only...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back former National Security Council China director Ryan Hass, who offers his perspective on the likely direction that the...

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Why have so many prominent critical and dissident intellectuals from China come out vocally in support of Donald Trump? This week on Sinica, Kaiser and...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Evan Feigenbaum, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he oversees research...

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This week on Sinica, we bring you a conversation with Pallavi Aiyar, a prolific writer and, until 2008, a Beijing-based journalist, and Ananth Krishnan, who...

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In this episode of Sinica, which was taped live at the fourth annual NEXTChina Conference on November 11, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Yifei Li...

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This week on Sinica, we teamed up with Columbia University Press and the Columbia Global Centers to convene a conversation with Brian Dott, a professor...

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This week on Sinica, we present the first installment in a three-part series produced in collaboration with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), highlighting the...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Rana Mitter, professor of the history and politics of modern China at St. Cross College, Oxford, and director...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Tobita Chow and Jake Werner about what a progressive U.S. policy toward China should look like. Tobita is...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with the Los Angeles–based film producer Peter Shiao about his vision of bringing wuxia 武侠 — a genre that...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Sebastian Strangio, the Southeast Asia editor at The Diplomat, about his new book, In the Dragon’s...

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Since February, a series of tit-for-tat restrictions on and expulsions of journalists in the U.S. and China have resulted in the decimation of the ranks...

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This week on Sinica, we discuss the controversy surrounding the decision by Beijing to selectively replace Mongolian-language instruction in schools in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous...

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This podcast was recorded as part of the 2020 SupChina Women’s Conference on September 9, 2020.  Susan Shirk, chair and research professor of the 21st...

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Jiayang Fan, friend of Sinica and staff writer for The New Yorker, joins Kaiser and Jeremy for a discussion on her recently published long-form piece, How...

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Since 2010, the China in Africa Podcast has brought balanced, wide-ranging conversations about one of the most consequential developments in the global economy and geopolitics...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Keisha Brown, Mark Akpaninyie, and Leland Lazarus about initiatives they’re involved with to increase black representation in China-related...

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This week on Sinica, in a show that was streamed live on August 27, Kaiser and Jeremy examine China’s efforts to fulfill the goal of...

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In a show taped in May, Kaiser chats with New York–based rapper Bohan Phoenix, who has gained audiences in both the U.S. and China, and...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Leland Lazarus, an American diplomat stationed in Barbados. Leland is a China specialist, and the conversation...

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Susan Thornton, former senior U.S. diplomat, returns to the Sinica Podcast this week. This conversation was recorded during the Princeton U.S.-China Coalition virtual event on...

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This week, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Adam Tooze, professor of history at Columbia University and author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Sir Danny Alexander, vice president and corporate secretary of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and former Liberal Democrat...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy talk to Wall Street Journal reporters Bob Davis and Lingling Wei about their great new book, Superpower Showdown:...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Andy Purdy, chief security officer of Huawei USA, and Paul Triolo, practice head of geotechnology at the Eurasia...

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Late on the night of June 15, a deadly melee erupted on the banks of the Galwan River, in a disputed region called Ladakh, high...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser speaks with Michael Berry, the translator of the Wuhan-based writer Fang Fang’s controversial Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Bloomberg’s chief economist, Tom Orlik, about his new book, China: The Bubble That Never Pops. A longtime resident of...

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This week on Sinica, we continue with the ongoing California series of podcasts that Kaiser recorded last winter, and present a conversation taped in December...

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This week, Kaiser and Jeremy speak with Michael Schuman, a reporter and writer who’s been covering China for 23 years, about his new book, Superpower Interrupted:...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Max Fisher, one of The Interpreter columnists for the New York Times, on what U.S. media coverage got...

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In this second half of our interview with Kishore Mahbubani, a former UN ambassador of Singapore, he talks to Kaiser about the perils of American...

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In the first part of this two-part conversation, Kishore Mahbubani, a former UN ambassador of Singapore, returns to Sinica to chat with Kaiser about his...

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No, not that Gordon Chang. The other one: the good one. Gordon H. Chang is a professor of American history at Stanford University, where he...

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A congressional bill and a draft executive order threaten to prevent U.S. government agencies from using drones made in China or that contain Chinese components...

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Literature professor and cineaste Jiwei Xiao, who grew up in Wuhan and whose mother still lives there, published a piece in the New York Review of Books about...

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For our 10th anniversary show, Kaiser and Jeremy recorded live on Zoom, shared some reminiscences, reflected on how China and the podcast have changed in...

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In a show taped on March 2, before the full force of COVID-19 had hit the U.S., Kaiser and Jeremy chatted with Parsifal D’Sola Alvarado...

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Liú Déhǎi 刘德海, master of the pipa, a type of Chinese lute, died at the age of 83 on April 11, 2020.  Liu was born...

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In a show taped in late February, Kaiser chats with Barbara Finamore, senior attorney and senior strategic director, Asia, for the Natural Resources Defense Council...

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This week, we bring you another show from the California podcast series that Kaiser recorded back in December, before the ravages of COVID-19. Take a...

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On this week’s show, veteran reporter Dexter “Tiff” Roberts chats with Kaiser and Jeremy about his new book, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser continues his California series with a conversation with Janet Yang, one of the legends of the U.S.-China film world, and...

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In a show taped live at the China-U.S. Summit at Duke University on February 29, Kaiser chats with Ambassador Craig Allen, the longtime Asia-based diplomat...

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In this episode, part of Sinica’s California series, Kaiser chats with Alex Wang, a professor of law at UCLA and an expert on China’s environmental...

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From the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 that ended the Qing dynasty to the Second Sino-Japanese War to Tiananmen in 1989 and Hong Kong 30 years...

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In a live show taped at the Asia Society, in partnership with ChinaFile, Kaiser sat down to chat with prolific author Mara Hvistendahl at the...

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This week, we feature an episode from the newest member of our Sinica Podcast Network: the China in Africa Podcast, hosted by Eric Olander and...

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Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where he directs the Global Health...

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With the United States now in a presidential election year, how should an incoming administration — whether a Democratic presidency or a second Trump administration...

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In the aftermath of the targeted killing of Qasem Soleimani in early January, Kaiser talked to Jeff Prescott, a veteran China-watcher who now serves as...

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Maggie Lewis, a law professor at Seton Hall University, discusses the recent presidential election in Taiwan, where she and other Chinese and Taiwanese legal scholars...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Professor Tai Ming Cheung of the University of California, San Diego. Tai is the director of the UC...

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On this week’s show, Kaiser chats with Alejandro Reyes, an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong and a former senior policy adviser to...

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In a show taped in Seattle, Kaiser chats with Gary Rieschel, founding managing partner of Qiming Venture Partners. With 30 unicorns and over 30 exits...

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Gary Locke served as the U.S. ambassador to China from 2011 to 2014. Locke was not only the first Chinese-American ambassador to China, but also...

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In a show taped in front of a live audience at SupChina’s NEXT China conference, Kaiser and Jeremy chatted with particle physicist Yangyang Cheng, one...

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Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, who covers China for Axios, was the lead reporter on an explosive leak of documents detailing the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other...

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Sinica brings you a little levity for this Thanksgiving weekend: In one of the last live events taped at the storied Bookworm in Beijing, which...

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In a podcast taped live for the Asia Society of Switzerland in Zurich, Kaiser is joined by Kristin Shi-Kupfer, director of the Research Area on...

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Fuchsia Dunlop, the preeminent writer on Chinese cuisine in the English language, has published a completely revised and updated version of Land of Plenty, her...

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser talks about the state of charitable giving in China with Scott Kennedy, senior adviser and Trustee Chair in Chinese Business...

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In this live show taped at New York University on October 16, Jeremy and Kaiser spoke with Jerry Cohen, the doyen of American studies of...

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This week on Sinica, Neil Thomas of MacroPolo sits down with Kaiser to talk about what we know — and what we don’t know —...

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Samm Sacks, a Cybersecurity Policy and China Digital Economy Fellow at New America, speaks with Kaiser on Huawei’s nebulous role in the U.S.-China trade war...

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Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), joins Kaiser for a discussion of the ongoing...

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The Sinica Podcast this week features an exclusive recording of a China Institute event in New York on September 17 that sought to answer this question:...

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy speak with Christian Shepherd, the Beijing correspondent for the Financial Times. They discuss his debut long-form...

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The Sinica Podcast Network is proud to introduce the latest member of our family, Strangers in China, hosted by Clay Baldo. It features the voices...

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This week, Sinica features a chat with Ed Pulford, author of the recent book Mirrorlands: Russia, China, and Journeys in Between. Kaiser chats with Ed...

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On this week’s podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy speak with Andy Rothman, an investment strategist at Matthews Asia, to get his take on recent developments in...

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Jessica Chen Weiss is Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University and a prolific writer on Chinese nationalism and China’s international relations. Kaiser sat down...

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Matt Sheehan, former China correspondent for the Huffington Post and current fellow at the MacroPolo think tank, discusses his new book, The Transpacific Experiment: How...

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This special episode of Sinica starring our very own Jeremy Goldkorn was recorded in New York on July 17. With decades of experience in China-related...

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This week, while Kaiser is vacationing on the Carolina coast, we are running a March 2014 interview with Orville Schell and David Moser. Orville is...

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Emily Feng is one of the rising stars among China reporters. She’s about to take up her post in Beijing as National Public Radio’s correspondent after an illustrious run with the Financial Times. In a show taped a few months ago, Emily speaks with Kaiser and Jeremy about her most recent reporting for the FT, covering important topics related to Xinjiang and technology. She also reflects on why, as a Chinese American, she feels like she’s under added pressure to present accurate and balanced reporting on China.

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The Washington Post recently published an open letter signed by five scholars and former government officials: M. Taylor Fravel, Stapleton Roy, Michael Swaine, Susan Thornton, and...

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Photo credit: CNN reporter James Griffiths This week, we speak again with Antony Dapiran, a corporate lawyer in Hong Kong and the author of City...

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This week, Kaiser chats with Huihan Lie, founder of the genealogical research startup MyChinaRoots, and with two of his colleagues, Clotilde Yap and Chrislyn Choo...

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This week, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Taylor Fravel, one of the world’s leading authorities on the People’s Liberation Army. Taylor has a brand-new book...

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Antony Dapiran is a seasoned corporate lawyer who has worked in Hong Kong and Beijing for the last two decades. In that time, he’s become a historian of protests in Hong Kong and the author of City of Protest: A Recent History of Dissent in Hong Kong(2017), which explores the idea of protest as an integral part of Hong Kong’s identity. In a conversation with Kaiser and Jeremy, Antony brings a historical perspective to his analysis of the current demonstrations over the highly unpopular extradition bill, the shelving of which has not slaked the anger of demonstrators.

He also wrote this op-ed for us earlier this week:

What is Hong Kong for?

What to listen for on this week’s Sinica Podcast:

7:46: Reports emerged last week that suggested that the extradition bill, met with fierce opposition in Hong Kong, originated from the office of Chief Executive Carrie Lam, rather than in Beijing. Antony provides his take on this development: “People felt it could only be the hand of Beijing behind this, directing the Hong Kong administration to do it. Otherwise, why would it be done in such a roughshod fashion on such an issue that was clearly going to be of great sensitivity in Hong Kong and potentially against the interest of the Hong Kong community? Notwithstanding how surprising it is, it really does raise questions about the competence of Carrie Lam and her administration.”

12:10: Given the stark pushback against the bill, did Lam and her team see this coming? As a career civil servant, she has never had to undergo a general election, so this fumble could be a result of “cluelessness,” according to Antony. “There are a number of jokes going around Hong Kong that she doesn’t know how to catch the MTR, or that when she first moved into the Chief Executive’s residence, she didn’t know where to buy toilet paper.”

13:57: Is the comparison to the Umbrella Movement of 2015 an apt one? Antony gives us his opinion: “They organized and mobilized themselves rather by way of online chat forums, private messaging groups on Telegram and WhatsApp — it’s even being said that they’re using AirDrop to communicate instructions and messages on the ground. And that is a really strong contrast to the Umbrella Movement of five years ago, which, even as a student movement, had very clear leadership and was very much centrally organized.”

He continues, “I think part of the reason why the protesters, this time around, are avoiding that model is precisely a direct response to the Hong Kong government’s aggressive prosecution and jailing of the Umbrella Movement leaders.”

24:46: What has happened since the Umbrella Movement in 2015? “The Umbrella Movement was regarded as a failure — it didn’t achieve its aims,” Antony states. “And then, in the five years since then, the Hong Kong government has steadily tightened the screws on dissent in the city… Using the cover of the legal system and Hong Kong’s rule of law has resulted in what I call a campaign of ‘lawfare’ for that reason.”

35:57: What of the leadership in Beijing and its take on the protests, and the handling of the protests by the Hong Kong government? Antony explains: “The vacuum that’s likely to be left by the much diminished authority of Carrie Lam in itself presents either an opportunity or a threat.” The opportunity being that, while the Legislative Council has “almost been reduced to rubber stamp function,” this may reinvigorate legislators in Hong Kong — whereas the threat may be that Beijing sees the vacuum as Hong Kong’s inability to govern itself, and “decides that it needs to intervene.”

Recommendations:

Jeremy: A Twitter account, @finnegansreader, which is a bot reading James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake line by line. There is a sister account for the author’s Ulysses, @ulyssesreader.

Antony: The author Dung Kai-cheung, and his masterpiece, Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City.

Kaiser: Total War: Three Kingdoms, a turn-based strategy game by Creative Assembly, and John Zhu’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms podcast.

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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Photo source: Manuel Frauendorf

Ryan Hass, who served as the Director for China on the National Security Council during President Barack Obama’s second term, is alarmed at the direction that the U.S. policy toward China has been taking, and offers good sense on what we could be doing instead. While clear-eyed about Beijing, he warns that the path Washington is now on will lead to some dire outcomes. Ryan joins Kaiser in a show taped at the Brookings Institution, where Ryan now serves as a Rubenstein fellow with the John L. Thornton China Center.

Today, we also publish on SupChina an essay by Ryan titled, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” In the essay, Ryan explains why the U.S.-China relationship will not return to the days before President Trump was elected, and suggests five questions the U.S. policy community could use to structure its thinking towards China going forward.

What to listen for on this week’s Sinica Podcast:

3:10: China-watchers have witnessed tumultuous change in the U.S.-China relationship since President Trump’s election in 2016. Ryan elaborates on changes in Washington: “For 40 years, center-right and center-left policymakers basically had their hands on the steering wheel of American policy toward China. That changed two years ago.” However, this may not hold true outside the Beltway, according to Ryan: “If we look at polling by Pew, or the Chicago Council…what we find is that most Americans don’t think of China either as a partner or as a rival. They have mixed feelings on China.”

14:12: Ryan shares his opinions on the current moment we find ourselves in concerning the bilateral relationship with China. “I personally think that we are in the most precarious moment in the U.S.-China relationship that we have been in since 1979, or perhaps 1972,” he states, explaining that conflicting diagnoses on the main areas of contention result in greater disarray. Ryan adds that actors in Beijing claim that the United States’ “anxieties about China’s relative rise” in Washington have resulted in the heavy-handed policies, whereas on the other hand, those in Washington claim China has “stepped back from the path of reform and opening,” thus justifying the current approach.

32:13: Has the argument of containment reemerged in the era of Trump? Kaiser suggests that, with arms sales to Taiwan, F-35 sales to Japan, and the increasingly severe action and rhetoric taken against Huawei, one could hesitantly say yes if viewing the current state of affairs from Beijing’s perspective. Ryan responds: “There was a point in time when I could say confidently yes, that [containment] is an unreasonable conclusion for Beijing to draw… It’s harder for me to make that same case credibly anymore.”

However, he does make a poignant case for optimism: “I guess I am just reluctant to accept the fatalism that seems to be so enrapturing the Beltway right now that it is impossible for our two countries, or systems, to coexist with each other because they are fundamentally at odds.”

40:53: The nature of the relationship between the United States and China will be one of increased competition. What can be done about it? Ryan suggests a more proactive approach, saying: “For me, the core question, though, isn’t whether we as Americans should feel righteous in our indignation about certain Chinese behaviors, but really: What should we be doing about it?”

Recommendations:

Ryan: The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal, by Bill Burns, a source of inspiration for Ryan in his diplomatic career, and the Hamilton soundtrack.

Kaiser: Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces, a collection of essays by Michael Chabon.

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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This week, Kaiser is joined by Nury Turkel of the Uyghur Human Rights Project in an in-depth conversation with Wu’er Kaixi (Örkesh Dölet), best known as one of the student leaders in the Tiananmen protests that rocked Beijing 30 years ago. He talks about the heady intellectual freedom of the 1980s, the movement’s goals in 1989, the frustrations of exile, and his growing involvement in the Uyghur diaspora’s efforts to draw attention to Beijing’s draconian detentions of Uyghurs and other Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region.

What to listen for on this week’s Sinica Podcast:

17:41: Nury references a movement that is often overlooked in the context of late 20th century democratic movements around the world that served as an inspiration for the Tiananmen student movements: “In 1989, we were imitating Poland. That’s a very important reference that the world should know. What happened in 1989 feels like the Solidarity movement in Poland. We saw it [come] along step by step, and it was very inspiring.”

25:34: Nury describes the dramatic scene of several hundred thousand university students from local colleges marching a circuit around the second ring road that encircles the center of Beijing: “When we took the ring road — I mean, 100,000 students took the ring road… what’s more exciting is the people standing by on the two sides of the ring road. [They were] Beijingers. Their support is the [thing] that gave us all the confidence. [There had] to be half a million people there that day.”

59:02: Nury asks Kaixi about inaction on behalf of both Muslim and Western governments regarding the ongoing internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang province. He responds: “The real reason the Uyghur movement has not been on the map — there are many, many factors that contribute to that: Number one, unfortunately, Uyghur people [follow] an Islamic faith. Let’s look at this with all honesty. Today’s world [is] not that honest. Today’s world is not that courageous. We don’t live in a perfect world. And the Western world finds it much more convenient to neglect the Uyghur movement.”

Also see:

A memorial to Uyghur civil rights and the legacy of Tiananmen

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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SupChina.direct — China consultants, on demand. Submit your project needs, and we will match you with qualified China consultants.

This week, Kaiser sits down with Jude Blanchette in the Sinica South Studio in Durham, North Carolina, to talk about Jude’s new book, China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong, which just came out on June 3. Jude explains the origins of the neo-Maoists and others on the left opposition, and how overlooking the conservative reaction to reform and opening impoverishes our understanding of China and its politics.

What to listen for on this week’s Sinica Podcast:

9:33: The show begins with a discussion on Diāo Wěimíng 刁伟铭, an editor of the prominent neo-Maoist website Utopia (乌有之乡 wūyǒu zhī xiāng), and his untimely death in a vehicle collision while leading a group of Chinese tourists in North Korea visiting the grave of Mao Zedong’s grandson. Jude states: “Not only is his story fascinating and the story of why the heck they were in North Korea, but also [because] the news of the bus crash was originally suppressed.” The sensitivity of information about neo-Maoists reflects how their relationship with the Communist Party is “fraught” and “complex,” Jude says, who adds that this relationship “has been evolving for decades and continues to evolve now.”

18:48: Are there online platforms that lend themselves to radicalization in China? Jude explains how individuals find these communities organically, and moments around the turn of the millennium that prompted galvanization, the 1999 NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade among them. “Several key print publications were shut down by Jiang Zemin in 2002 and 2003, and these were old, established, thick theoretical journals that essentially had been the only remaining outlets for the conservative intellectuals…and after those publications were shut down, they really cast about to see what to do next, and I think had there been no internet, it would have been quite difficult to reconstitute a movement. But they saw this fledgling piece of information technology…this provided a public square, so to speak, where people could come together.”

27:34: What is neo-authoritarianism? What are the linkages between this ideology, the neo-Maoists, and the increasing prominence of technology? Jude tells the story of this theory in China and of the early progenitors, one of whom now sits on the Politburo Standing Committee.

31:21: How does the radical left in China view the protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989? Jude notes: “You would think given what we know about the current political program of neo-Maoism that they would either minimize or deny that there was any sort of massacre on June 4th, but in fact that’s actually not the case…there’s actually a much more nuanced position on things like the Cultural Revolution and June 4th than you would originally think.”

57:32: During Wen Jiabao’s tenure in office, Jude claims there is a reason why he pointed to the Cultural Revolution — to warn against the increase in radical leftist political views: “I do think there is a reason Wen Jiabao chose to invoke the spirit of the cultural revolution when essentially he wanted to warn about the neo-Maoists and Bo Xilai. That there is this thread of radical politics, which is always a threat to the Communist Party. And the most powerful fuel for this radical style of politics is not this sort of Liu Xiaobo, Ai Weiwei [style of] constitutional democracy. That’s not what the Party is really afraid of. It’s more afraid of people who outflank it from the left.”

Recommendations:

Jude: Behind the Curve, a film investigation into the “Flat Earth” community.

Kaiser: How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr, a story of the United States beyond the lower 48 states.

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, we are happy to share a live recording from the third annual SupChina Women’s Conference. Jeremy and Kaiser sat down with Ambassador Charlene Barshefsky, now a senior international partner at the law firm of WilmerHale, and a former United States Trade Representative under the Clinton administration. She came to New York for a candid discussion on her views regarding the recent deterioration of trade talks, her own experiences in the office of the United States Trade Representative, Huawei’s role in the dispute between the U.S. and China, and more possibilities in the trade war moving forward.

What to listen for on this week’s Sinica Podcast:

3:42: What caused the trade deal to go up in smoke? The tariff hikes? The executive order banning Huawei? Chinese negotiators reneging on previously agreed-upon wording? Charlene provides her opinion — noting a misjudgement on Trump’s negotiating style, among other factors: “First of all, a continued and persistent misapprehension on the part of Xi Jinping about Donald Trump…coupled with seeing a text in full. Which, when one sees constituent parts, might not seem too overbearing, but when one sees in full relief, looks exceptionally overbearing, making China look, perhaps, small. Coupled with a sense on the part of China that certain of the provisions, in total, either impinged on China’s sovereignty with respect to changes in laws, or were unrealistic with respect to the extent of purchases the U.S. wanted China to make, or were themselves not emblematic of the negotiations that took place.”

14:37: How can leaders preempt the common criticism of trade deals that the final agreement erodes the sovereignty of their country? Charlene suggests an interesting rhetorical strategy to take during the negotiating process: “Let’s suppose I say to you: I will never agree to a deal that puts in question the sovereignty of my country. Never. I will never do that. And then you do a deal. Which, actually, puts in question the sovereignty of your country. But because you’ve said, quite convincingly, you’d never do a deal that does that. Whatever it is you did over here, by definition, is not that. So, you’ve covered yourself.”

22:44: What is the Trump administration’s approach to macroeconomic policy, and how could this view affect the bilateral relationship with China and other U.S. trade partners? Charlene offers some perspective on the bigger picture: “I think the Trump administration is quite interested in managed trade. I think this is really the calling card — that is to say, ‘We want you to buy more from us. And if you don’t buy more from us in the following quantity over the following time frame, well, we’re just going to have to impose tariffs on you to even out the score.’ Whatever score is being kept in his mind.”

She continues: “One of the difficulties with these kinds of solutions is that they’re often very costly to consumers. They’re intended to divert trade from the existing suppliers to your suppliers…it just takes the hunk that was Brazil’s, or Argentina’s, or Europe’s, or South Africa’s, and gives it to the United States. Those countries, most assuredly, will not stand still for it as their industries, who are trading fairly, suffer from the repercussions of what is a managed trade approach.”

30:07: Attacks on Huawei via public denunciation and executive orders seem to have hit China in a way that tariffs and other escalatory measures have not. Jeremy asks, “How does this sledgehammer approach to Huawei complicate China’s negotiating position?” Charlene acknowledges national security concerns regarding the company but also underlines the importance of interchange in the 21st-century tech ecosystem: “Huawei is just stuck in the middle. There’s a security aspect, and a highly positive, innovative, and economic aspect. So, could there be a better way to protect the security aspect, or mitigate that aspect, while not losing this other very important part of the Huawei equation? I don’t think the administration was interested in trying to thread that course, at least not at the present time. But at some point, it will be necessary to thread that course, or we will see not just Huawei disadvantaged, but most of our major tech companies highly disadvantaged as well.”

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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This week’s podcast was recorded at the Caixin “Talking China’s Economy: 2019 Forecasts and Strategies” conference in Chengdu in April. Kaiser spoke with Professor Hé Fān 何帆 of the Antai College of Economics and Management at Shanghai Jiaotong University, and Michael Anti, CEO of Caixin Globus, which tracks Chinese global investment. They chat about how “globalization,” which once meant “Americanization” to many Chinese, has taken on a much broader meaning as SAFE concerns over capital flight have reeled in the “gray rhinos” after an investment spree, and as a stricter CFIUS regime has made U.S. investments more difficult.

What to listen for on this week’s Sinica Podcast:

7:04: Professor He Fan explains the nature of the bilateral investment relationship between the United States and China in the 21st century: “Recently, the number [of Chinese investment in the United States] in 2017 is above six billion US dollars and accounts for four percent of China’s outbound foreign direct investment. And I haven’t seen — even when talking about [China’s investment in] other parts of the world, the Belt and Road, other countries — but I haven’t seen a dramatic decline of China’s investment in the United States. And if you look at the numbers, I think we tend to overestimate the importance of bilateral investment.”

14:13: How much scrutiny is being placed on Chinese investment in the United States, and what does the outbound investment landscape from China look like at the current moment? Michael: “Actually Chinese companies have two challenges to put the investment out: first, is the government … But, in terms of the many Chinese internet companies — they have US dollar funds. Because they have US dollars in Hong Kong. Not all in Silicon Valley, not necessarily in Beijing. So that kind of money isn’t really controlled by the Chinese government. Then, they meet the second challenge. The American government, [or] CFIUS. CFIUS is now blocking, I would say 90 percent of Chinese tech investment in the United States.”

19:10: Are immigration and Chinese investment linked? Michael sees a link, and points out investment in southern Europe and Japan as examples – however Professor He Fan pushes back: “I think we can find this link between immigration and investment, but then, it would be very difficult to use this as a proxy to predict where Chinese money will go, because Chinese people are everywhere. I’ve traveled to more than fifty countries and there is only one country where I cannot find many Chinese people. It’s Cuba. Because it’s a planned economy and Chinese people are not allowed to do business there.”

He Fan continues, “People are talking about decoupling of China and the United States. For me, it’s very difficult to imagine the decoupling of the two largest economies in the world … to be frank, I think people in Washington D.C. and Beijing tend to overestimate their influence. And people in Chengdu are much better.”

28:13: Who is doing the overseas investment in areas outside of the United States, state-owned enterprises or privately owned enterprises? Professor He Fan introduces the Wenzhou index: “In other foreign markets, in Africa and Southeast Asia for example, my understanding is private companies discovered those new markets first and then [were] followed by some of the state-owned enterprises. So, private companies, like businessmen in Wenzhou and Yiwu, they always move faster than state-owned enterprises.”

42:14: He Fan give a prognosis for China’s relationship with its regional neighbors, Japan and Korea. Besides a notable warming of relations — could the downturn in U.S.-China relations rekindle the bilateral relationship in these countries? He Fan doesn’t think so, whose compass points southward: “I think this improvement of the bilateral relationship between China and Japan is a strategy … there’s no place where China can close the gap, if there’s really decoupling between China and the United States. But, maybe a new market in China will increase their investment and trade in the near future — my guess is Southeast Asia.”

Recommendations:

Michael: Two TV shows: Billions and The Good Fight.

He Fan: His new book,变量 biàn liàng by Hé Fān 何帆, and a French book, Le piège américain (“The American Trap” in English).

Kaiser: A Woman First: First Woman by Selina Meyer and Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah.

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy speak with Sulmaan Wasif Khan, assistant professor of international history and Chinese foreign relations at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, about his book, Haunted by Chaos: China’s Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping. He makes the case that China’s overriding concern is for maintaining the security and integrity of the state — something that, given China’s long history of foreign invasion, warlordism, civil war, and contested borders, hasn’t been easy.

What to listen for on this week’s Sinica Podcast:

4:55: Does grand strategy need to be articulated, or communicated clearly to the general population? Usually the answer is yes, where nation states unify diplomatic, economic, and military power to pursue broadscale goals. However, China’s case is different, according to Sulmaan: “There does seem to be this overarching national objective, there is a sense in which the different categories of power [diplomacy, economics, and military] were calibrated to achieve that overarching national objective, but you don’t get it articulated that often, if at all.”

14:44: How much useful insight on contemporary Chinese politics can be gleaned by looking to the past? Sulmaan breaks it down: “China’s imperial past [is] much less grand than it’s typically considered to be… China’s empires at different points had different security threats. At various points, it wasn’t an Asia-centric order. So, simply imposing one version of the imperial past on China’s millennia of history, and saying, ‘This is the way it’s always been,’ seems to be a little misguided.”

One feature from the imperial era that sticks out? Disorder. Sulmaan continues: “If you think about the Taiping Rebellion, for example, if you think about the Opium Wars — these are things that I think Chinese leaders still look to in the imperial past and worry about. The stories of the Opium Wars have never left the consciousness of the leadership, or Chinese people, for that matter. And that’s important to remember.”

30:07: “Hide your strength and bide your time” is a maxim spoken by Deng Xiaoping that has been used to define much of the era of reform and opening up. But is this truly an apt description of the time? Sulmaan states: “Hide and bide doesn’t really begin to sum up what [Deng] is up to. If you think about the sheer scale of economic change going on there, it’s kind of hard to keep that hidden — he’s almost like a kid when it comes to one country, two systems and joint development, how much he brags about those to anyone who will listen. That’s not hide and bide. If you’re sitting across the strait in Taiwan, you’re not seeing a lot of hiding and biding.

41:58: What are China’s future intentions on a grand strategic scale, and how do policymakers in the West feel about it? Sulmaan explains his view: “It says something about the way we typically think about China and other countries — that that kind of alarmism gains traction. There’s that old Atticus Finch line about walking around in someone else’s shoes and seeing how they feel, and I think much of the American foreign policy establishment is pretty bad at that. If the Chinese are doing something that we don’t like, it’s undemocratic or tyrannical. If the Russians are doing something we don’t like, ditto. If you’re not doing it our way, there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.”

Recommendations:

Jeremy: Nathan Hale — cartoonist, author, and illustrator of graphic novels for children.

Sulmaan: Watership Down, by Richard Adams. A useful vessel for understanding China and a source of grand strategic wisdom.

Kaiser: Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America, by Vegas Tenold, and Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, by Kathleen Belew.

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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On this week’s show, recorded live in New York on April 3, Kaiser and Jeremy have a wide-ranging chat with former New York Times China correspondent Howard French, now a professor at Columbia University’s School of Journalism. We talk about his book Everything Under the Heavens and China’s ambitions and anxieties in the world today.

What to listen for on this week’s Sinica Podcast:

7:31: How do Chinese people react to Western reporting about China? Howard has noticed a shift in his students from the People’s Republic of China and suggests, “Because of the changing climate in China, [Chinese students] have a greater appreciation of some of the liberties that go into being able to express criticism about China or being able to think off the beaten path about China.”

23:48: The three discuss Howard’s book, Everything Under The Heavens, and some of the themes in it. Howard: “So the argument that runs through the book is that, if not DNA, then these two realities of [China’s] longevity and continuity on the one hand, and size on the other hand, have created habits of language and habits of mind and patterns of diplomacy that are fairly consistent, but we can see them repeating themselves in variations over a very, very long period of time.”

32:56: Is China a revisionist power or a status quo power? Before Jeremy can finish asking this question, Howard replies, “It’s both.” Howard explains how this could be possible: “There is an insistent notion in China that I admire. I don’t think it’s always to China’s benefit, but I admire the instinct, if instinct is the right world. ‘For every problem we should find a Chinese way to answer it.’ And so, if international relations can be construed as a problem…then finding a Chinese way alongside of accepting incumbent arrangements is a reflex that one is likely to continue to see in China.”

44:46: The relationship between the United States and China appears to have arrived at a critical juncture. In response to Kaiser’s request to provide a prognosis for U.S.-China relations, Howard contests that “most of the liability of the present moment is actually bound up in the present moment.” He continues, “There will be consequences to pay even if Trump goes [in 2020]…and that the United States, I think, no matter what happens in the succession year after Trump, in the best of scenarios, will still have surrendered some not inconsiderable part of its prestige and power in the world.”

Recommendations:

Jeremy: The Idle Parent: Why Laid-Back Parents Raise Happier and Healthy Kids, by Tom Hodgkinson, a case for laissez-faire parenting.

Howard: Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order, by J.C. Sharman, and River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, by Walter Johnson.

Kaiser: An article in the London Review of Books, Is this the end of the American century?, by Adam Tooze.

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Wendy Cutler, vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, about a new paper she has authored that calls for coordination between the U.S. and other countries in managing issues related to China trade. She makes the case for working through the WTO and other multilateral organizations, and explains why China is more apt to respond more positively to multilateral over bi- or unilateral approaches.

What to listen for on this week’s Sinica Podcast:

4:08: American and Chinese economic advisers Robert Lighthizer and Liu He are said to be inching toward finalizing an agreement on bilateral trade in the early weeks of May. To begin, Wendy offers some insight into what developments could come: “I think we’re going to see a pretty robust agreement between the United States and China. It’ll have up to 150 pages of commitments, including market access commitments, purchasing commitments, structural reform commitments, as well as an enforcement mechanism to make sure China lives up to its obligations under the commitments.”

16:11: Wendy suggests that the building of new coalitions may be necessary, given the difficulty in gathering the 164 votes from each World Trade Organization member country needed for a formal agreement, and urges openness on collaboration on different issues with a wider range of partners. “What we’re advocating is that the United States doesn’t get fixated on working with the same countries on certain issues… If the United States has concerns, chances are other countries have concerns, too. So reach out to other countries and see if, at a minimum, you can share information, and maybe, at a maximum, coordinate responses or even send joint representations to China on what needs to be changed. There’s a range of options.”

25:28: What of investment restrictions on Chinese companies in the United States? Wendy elaborates on her suggested strategy: “We suggest that the United States work and coordinate with other countries to see what they’re doing in this area. Because, for the United States, we don’t want to see a situation where we put so many restrictions on Chinese access to our market, and then China just turns elsewhere. Our measures are then less effective.”

29:41: Could this approach lead to a less antagonistic relationship with China, at least regarding trade? Wendy explains: “My hope is that with a U.S.-China trade agreement in the offing, I think, once again, we’re in the endgame and we’ll see a trade agreement soon. We’ll see, at least on the trade front, a reduction in tensions in this area and hopefully this reduction will maybe spread to other areas. I do think we’re in a new world now — that there’s going to be tensions between the United States and China in all of these areas — but I’m hopeful that through the close contacts our negotiators have forged as a result of the U.S.-China trade talks, that this could help deescalate a lot of tensions as they are emerging…”

Recommendations:

Jeremy: A free bird identification app called Merlin Bird ID, produced by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Wendy: Finding a few songs to help the Chinese and U.S. negotiators to get through the highs and lows of international trade talks.

Kaiser: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou.

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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This week on Sinica, China-watching wunderkind Julian Gewirtz joins Kaiser and Jeremy to chat about his recent paper on the American futurist Alvin Toffler (author of Future Shock and The Third Wave), who found a surprisingly receptive audience in the China of the early 1980s. His ideas on the role of technology in modernization were widely embraced by leaders of China’s reform movement — including both Dèng Xiǎopíng 邓小平 and his right-hand man, Zhào Zǐyáng 赵紫阳. Julian describes how Toffler came to the attention of the reformers, and discusses the lasting impact of his influence.

11:51: As the Cultural Revolution ended, Chinese officials and intellectuals began to look for ideas that could breathe new life into the Chinese intelligentsia and bureaucracy. A translator named Dǒng Lèshān 董乐山 went to the United States, repeatedly came across The Third Wave, and subsequently invited Toffler to come to China. And so he did, with many copies of his book. One thing led to another, and Toffler’s work came under the gaze of the State Council and Zhao Ziyang himself. Jeremy reflects, “This is, in some ways, a story of China for foreigners in the 1980s and 1990s — you could have any shtick if you were a hustler. You could arrive in Beijing with your books and hand them out. The next thing, the Politburo is listening to you. Those days are long gone.”

15:35: In writing his first book, which focused extensively on economists, Julian came across Alvin Toffler’s name repeatedly. Upon delving further into research for his paper on Toffler, he got a bit more than he expected: “To be totally frank, I did not expect, when I started looking into it, that I would end up finding a story, from the Chinese perspective, of very significant interest that was more than just an intellectual craze or fad, but that really connected to fundamental questions about technology policy, how the Chinese state should support new technologies, and in a sense, the future that the Chinese leadership was envisioning for China itself.”

22:31: Technology policy, and mastering the implementation of such policy, has been a focus for Chinese leadership stretching to the beginning of reform and opening. Julian explains the importance of science and technology policy as China opened to the world: “We see a global information technology revolution occurring, and worry among Chinese leaders that, just as they’re opening to the world, just as China is beginning its process of catching up, maybe they’ll be left behind again. And the impetus to try to get ahead of the information technology revolution, which is one of the central goals that Deng and Zhao work on together, is, I think, a crucial aspect of the 1980s that we haven’t really understood so well thus far.”

32:21: Science and technology are venerated in China in a way that draws a stark contrast with the United States. “The nerds are the jocks in high school,” says Jeremy, to which Kaiser remarks, “Exactly. But they don’t ride by in the Camaro and shout, ‘Jock!’” Julian explains what this means on a broader scale: “We need to begin by looking at [Chinese technology] on its own terms, before we import our own ideas onto it. The reason that studying the transnational flow of ideas, someone like Toffler becoming big in China — the reason that can be so revealing, I think, is that it allows us to accentuate dimensions that differ or are unusual, or are surprising to observers from outside, again centering on that Chinese perspective, the Chinese leadership’s view of these things, and how certain ideas play there in a different way than how they play in the United States.”

Recommendations:

Jeremy: A 2006 People’s Daily interview with Alvin Toffler, who, contrary to popular belief, has some interesting ideas.

Julian: Poems by W. S. Merwin, “The Hydra” in particular, and Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China, by Xiaolu Guo.

Kaiser: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, by Steven Pinker, and “The Two Cultures,” an essay by C. P. Snow.

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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China’s most famous Canadian, Mark Rowswell, became famous — or at least “feimerse” — after appearing in the Spring Festival Gala on CCTV in 1990. In recent years, he’s pioneered a hybrid between the xiangsheng (相声 xiàngsheng; crosstalk) for which he’s known and Western-style stand-up comedy. Mark joined Anthony Tao and David Moser at the storied Bookworm on the penultimate night of the Bookworm Literary Festival on March 30 to talk about the Chinese language, comedy, and the difficulties of Chinese soft power.

What to listen for on this week’s Sinica Podcast:

11:51: Learning Chinese is difficult — however, the specific types of difficulties that individuals are presented with often vary widely. Ethnically Chinese people are often held to a higher linguistic standard than their Caucasian counterparts, whereas foreigners who speak Chinese have become less of a rarity — and consequently less professionally valuable — in recent years. Mark explains: “I’ve had friends say, ‘You know the Chinese respect the ugly American. They don’t respect the sensitive, understanding Chinese-speaking foreigner. They like foreigners to be foreign.’”

29:22: Dīng Guǎngquán 丁广泉, a late titan of the Chinese comedy world, was one of Mark and David’s mentors. Non-judgmental and highly attentive to his disciples’ strong and weak points (he once wrote a scene describing David as muddle-headed and forgetful), he created a platform for many foreigners to enter the world of performance in Chinese. Mark states: “For us, it was very much a partnership, because he wasn’t all that well known in China, either. I had the name, the image, the fame that brought these opportunities to perform, but he was the guy who knew how to do it. I wouldn’t know how to do this by myself. That had a huge impact on me.”

32:43: “Your Chinese is so good!” A woman had overheard Mark telling Anthony the name of a restaurant in Chinese and promptly complimented him. According to Mark, the reactions he gets when speaking Chinese with shopkeepers or taxi drivers hasn’t changed much in 20 years, pushing back on the idea that the novelty of foreigners speaking Chinese has faded. David quips, “What does that tell you? That Chinese is very hard to learn.” “Well,” Mark contests, “we still do a bad job of it.”

44:04: Is the difficulty of the Chinese language a hindrance on China’s ability to export soft power? Mark explains: “First of all, the Chinese state sort of organizes everything so it has to be an official program. And secondly, Chinese people, I think, just tend to tense up when they sense that they’re dealing with foreigners — they have to be careful about what they say, and they’re a ‘representative of China,’ you know, they have this huge emotional burden that they bring to it. I think that’s the main problem China has with soft power: They don’t let their people express that power.”

Recommendations:

David: Recommends investigating books by Earnshaw Books, a Hong Kong–based publishing house, founded by Graham Earnshaw. Graham’s music can also be found online on his Bandcamp page.

Mark: Thirteen Invitations (十三邀 shísān yāo), by Xǔ Zhīyuǎn 许知远, a video series that can be found on Tencent Video here.

Anthony: The website What’s on Weibo, the Beijing Invitational Craft Beer Festival, hosted by Great Leap, and The Last Tribe on Earth, by Liane Halton and Anthony Tao.

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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Is the ongoing anti-corruption drive a sincere effort to root out official wrongdoing? Or is it a political purge of the enemies of Xí Jìnpíng 习近平? These questions have been hotly debated since the outset of the campaign in 2013. Now Peter Lorentzen of the University of San Francisco and Xi Lu of the National University of Singapore have harnessed data to examine the anti-corruption drive in the hopes of settling the question. Kaiser sat down with Peter on the sidelines of the recent Association for Asian Studies Conference to talk about the findings in their paper, “Personal Ties, Meritocracy, and China’s Anti-Corruption Campaign.”

What to listen for on this week’s Sinica Podcast:

22:57: Of the many officials that have been purged since 2012, “three big tigers” in particular stand out: Sū Róng 苏荣, Líng Jìhuà 令计划, and Zhōu Yǒngkāng 周永康. Of the provinces Xi Lu and Peter analyzed, economic performance was a large contributing factor for official promotion except for Jiangxi, Shanxi, and Sichuan. Here, Peter provides background on these three officials, their downfall, and the “tiger territories” they previously oversaw.

30:34: In 2012, Bó Xīlái 薄熙来 was considered one of the main contenders to challenge Xi Jinping’s ascent to power. His association with the murder of a British businessman, Neil Heywood, reportedly ordered by his wife, brought a swift end to his political success. However, Peter was surprised by what he found regarding his political network in the aftermath: “If you rank people using the Google PageRank algorithm, you find Bo Xilai was below 20th. What that means, in practice, is that in our data there were not many people reported as being his cronies who were subordinate to him compared to a lot of other people.”

32:42: What does the inability of Politburo Standing Committee members to protect their personal networks say about the current political climate in China? Peter: “Even when you clump all other six Politburo [Standing Committee] members together, we didn’t see a sort of protective effect. Their associates, people we believed to be connected with them, were just as likely to go down as anyone else. So the question is: Why were they not able to protect their people?… This is not something we can observe directly in our data, but my sense is that it does show the demise of the collective leadership, first-among-equals approach.”

39:26: How many people have been subject to the corruption crackdown? Peter studied those who were investigated, whose names were published in reports by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection by 2015. “We’re looking at the first wave of the crackdown, but that was just a thousand people [whose names we could get]. I was looking at some estimates last night, and I think people are saying that the total number as of the end of last year was 20,000 to 30,000 people overall. And you know, they’re not all people who looked wrong at Xi Jinping some day. So it’s pretty clear that he’s got to have some other way of deciding who goes down.”

Recommendations:

Peter: Two sitcoms, Speechless (available on ABC) and Kim’s Convenience (available on Netflix).

Kaiser: Two playlists on Spotify, “Instrumental Madness” and “Got Djent?”

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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Kaiser sat down with Nury Turkel, chairman and founder of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, at the recent Association for Asian Studies conference in Denver for an impromptu catch-up on the current crisis in Xinjiang. Nury last appeared on the Sinica Podcast half a year ago. They discussed the policy options available to the U.S. as well as the difficulties of trying to get through to Chinese elites and ordinary Chinese people alike.

What to listen for on this week’s Sinica Podcast:

2:31: The conversation begins with a recap of vote counts and support behind bipartisan bills that are currently working through the U.S. Congress: the Uighur Intervention and Global Humanitarian Unified Response (UIGHUR Act) and the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act. Nury says that there could be more news on these bills in the coming months: “We were told that there’s a chance that [the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act] will be finalized…sometime this summer.”

6:44: Nury calls for a larger international coalition to decry the horrors in Xinjiang, and highlight the shadow that Uyghur internment will cast on the longer history of China, stating, “In the end, we want two things. One, we want the camps to be shut down. It’s an embarrassment to the Chinese people, even in their history. It needs to be shut down. And, two, we want to be able to restore the Uyghur people’s basic dignity. Give them their dignity and respect back.”

17:48: After reporting emerged on the supposed death of famed Uyghur musician Abdurehim Heyit, Beijing pushed back with a dubious “proof of life” video. This has resulted in a social media movement to raise awareness about the horrors being committed in Xinjiang, #MeTooUyghur. Nury comments: “So, this #MeTooUyghur movement is building up still. What is amazing about this is that a lot of Uyghurs who were not comfortable sharing their stories are coming out. So, the more people show up and come out telling their stories, the more people know about it. Eventually, it will result in some tangible action.”

27:12: The Uyghurs’ ongoing internment has taken a heavy toll on them. Nury explains: “The Uyghur communities around the world [are] going through a really tough time. Crippling anxiety, a sense of guilt, hopelessness…basically [making] the Uyghurs feel disconnected from their family members. Just basic things, such as calling your parents to say, ‘How are you?’ Just imagine that you hear your mother died in a concentration camp through Radio Free Asia. Just imagine that you recognize your children in the Chinese government propaganda material as a happy child…just imagine that you manage to go to your homeland and you are not able to see your sister because your iris was not scanned or [not] part of the government data. Just imagine that you walk out and try to go to your parents’ cemetery and the Chinese government prevents you because of your religion.”

39:58: How can individuals reach out and help sympathetic Han Chinese who are in China and willing to make a stand for the Uyghurs in Xinjiang? Nury underlines the high stakes involved, not only for the Uyghurs, but for all of China: “At least recognizing that what the Chinese government is doing in the 21st century, criminalizing the entire population [of Uyghurs] collectively, is not good for Chinese civilization.”

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.