Sinica Early Access: Recent Episodes
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For SupChina Access members only: An exclusive early listen to the interviews on the Sinica Podcast, hosted by Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn.
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!
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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
- Titanic’s six Chinese survivors tell a story that goes far beyond a shipwreck (1912)
- The problem with Mao’s ‘continuous’ revolution
- 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)
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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.
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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. Just back from a trip to China during which he spoke with numerous companies working in the space, he 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.
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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.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by 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’s 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.
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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, who 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.
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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
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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 talk about China’s push for Military-Civil Fusion, debunking some of the myths about the program that U.S. pundits and policymakers have imbibed.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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, which examines the decision to invade Iraq in March 2003. Mike is a senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation and a former professor at the National War College, and he warns of certain parallels between what happened 20 years ago and the growing sense of urgency and moral imperative to confront China that he now senses in Washington.
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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 London, her beat is China-Europe relations, and on this episode she discusses German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's recent trip to China, and how Europe and European countries are navigating the fraught U.S.-China relationship.
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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 Endowment for International Peace, at the recent East Asia Strategy Forum, held on November 1-2 in Ottawa, Canada. Kaiser also offers his quick take on the three-hour meeting between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden in Bali, Indonesia.
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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 Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department during the first Obama administration. Anne-Marie talks about how collaboration on issues of global concern — pandemics, global warming, and more — requires the U.S. to deprioritize some aspects of its competition with China.
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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 is joined by Lizzi Lee, MIT-trained economist-turned-reporter and host of the Chinese-language show "Wall Street Today" and of The China Project's "Live with Lizzi Lee," and by Damien Ma, who heads the Paulson Institute's in-house think tank MacroPolo. These two top-shelf analysts of Chinese politics break down what was important — and what was just a sideshow — at the 20th Party Congress, and offer their knowledgeable perspectives on the individuals named to key posts and what this likely means for China's direction. Don't miss this one!
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with his colleague Lizzi Lee, an MIT-trained economist turned journalist; and with Damien Ma, who heads the Paulson Institute's China-focused think tank MacroPolo. As two of the smartest folks around when it comes to making sense of elite politics in China, they are the perfect guests for a deep dive into what really came out of the Party Congress that concluded just last week. This show was taped at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on Thursday, October 27.
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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 one of the most puzzling figures to come out of China: Guo Wengui, a.k.a. Miles Kwok, who took what he learned about dealing with power and money in China and applied those lessons to the U.S., insinuating himself with leading figures of the American right. Who is this mysterious man, and what is he really after?
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This week on Sinica, I chat with Susan Shirk about how the deliberately collective leadership of the Hu Jintao years set the stage for the over-concentration of power under Xi Jinping and created conditions for overreach. She argues that Chinese overreach was met with American overreaction — not just in the Trump years, but continuing into the Biden administration.
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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 series all about Xi Jinping called The Prince. The podcast features interviews with a wide range of China-watchers, peers of Xi, dissidents, and many others who offer insights into what makes Xi tick.
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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 decades as a China-based correspondent, news presenter, and China editor. She talks about her podcast series on the Bo Xilai scandal, her longitudinal documentary series on White Horse Village, and her struggle with the BBC to win equal pay for women.
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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 the process, in the interest of transparency:
Minister Xu’s team did request questions in advance, and they were all accepted without alteration except to suggest that two questions, both related to public diplomacy efforts, be combined. Questions on subjects like Taiwan, Xinjiang, and China’s Zero-COVID policy were all accepted without even any suggestions on changes of wording. Kaiser was also able to follow up on questions without any objection at all.
Where Minister Xu cited numbers and made factual claims, we made a good faith effort to check them — for example, on the number of acres in the recent offshore oil lease approvals made by the Biden administration.
Doubtless, there will be listeners who will wish that Kaiser had been more forceful, and there may be some who believe I was perhaps too forceful. Sinica is not a “gotcha” show and never has been, and we believe there is value in hearing the perspectives of a ranking Chinese diplomat, and we hope you agree that the interview is very much worth listening to.
The interview has only been edited only for clarity and concision — taking out filler or hesitation words and pick-ups.
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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 the China-Global South Project (formerly the China Africa Project), Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden. Kaiser chats with them about where the show is going, and common misconceptions about China's role in the Global South.
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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 a New Era of Social Control. From Urumqi to Uganda and from Hangzhou to the Bronx, the book explores every facet of technological surveillance from the technocratic mindset that birthed it to its spread, with Beijing's help, to many countries of the developing world. But it also examines the role that U.S. tech companies played in giving rise to it.
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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 Resilient is the CCP?" The essay examines how China's bureaucracy remains surprisingly competent and even relatively autonomous despite Xi Jinping's highly personalistic style of rule.
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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 CFR International Affairs Fellow working in the State Department's Office of Policy Planning. She talks about an important essay published in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, titled "The China Trap: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Perilous Logic of Zero-Sum Competition,” which calls on the U.S. to formulate an affirmative vision for the relationship with China instead of pursuing an ad-hoc policy predicated simply on countering what China does.
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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 Pops. Ahead of the release of the new, updated edition of his book, we ask him about all that has changed in the two-and-a-half years since the publication of the first edition — and whether the real estate crisis, the Common Prosperity agenda, China's fraying foreign relations, or the COVID lockdowns are finally going to bring about the crash long predicted by the "China bears."
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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 Space Station for over six months. Leroy is also very knowledgeable about China's space program and was the first American astronaut to visit the Astronaut Center of China outside of Beijing. He discusses the abortive history of Sino-American space collaboration, attitudes toward China's space program in the U.S., and China's impressive accomplishments and its grand ambitions for space.
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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 brand new book America's Great Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition. Ali's book calls on American policymakers to craft a strategy that is guided by confidence and a clear vision of American renewal and emphasizes America's competitive advantages, rather than being determined by the behavior of our notional competitors, especially China.
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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser chats with John Culver, who served as national intelligence officer for East Asia from 2015 to 2017 and as a CIA analyst focusing on China for 35 years. With Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan very much in the news, John looks at the lessons that all parties drew from the last Taiwan Straits Crisis, in 1995-96, as well as the parallels to the Diaoyu/Senkaku crisis of the fall of 2012, after the Japanese government nationalized the disputed islands.
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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, or Coffee and Silk. While this episode is in English, the podcast will be mostly in Spanish — our first non-English show. The host is Parsifal D'Sola, who is Executive Director of the ABF China Latin America Research Center and a nonresident senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. Parsifal is native of Venezuela, and his focus is on Sino-Latin American relations. Between 2019 and 2020, he acted as Chinese Foreign Policy Advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs under the Interim Government of Venezuela of Juan Guaido.
In this episode, Parsifal talks with Dr. Evan Ellis. Evan is a research professor of Latin American Studies at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. His work focuses on the region’s relationships with China and other non-Western Hemisphere actors as well as transnational organized crime and populism in the region. He previously served as on the Secretary of State’s policy planning staff with responsibility for Latin America and the Caribbean as well as international narcotics and law enforcement issues. Evan has also been awarded the Order of Military Merit José María Córdova by the Colombian government for his scholarship on security issues in the region.
Latin America has been the world’s most affected region due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Poverty levels have risen considerably, and economic contraction is several points higher than the global average. How will this affect Sino- Latin American relations? Furthermore, while the United States increasingly loses influence across the region, Chinese foreign policy has become more sophisticated and localized, filling many of the spaces traditionally filled by the United States and other Western actors. Evan helps us answer these questions and offers recommendations both for the United States in dealing with China’s growing role in the region, as well as advice for Latin American countries in managing the challenges that greater engagement with China will bring about.
Recommendations:
· China Engages Latin America: Distorting Development and Democracy? By Evan Ellis
Links of interest:
· Articles from Evan Ellis at Global Americans
· Andrés Bello Foundation - China Latin America Research Center
· Twitter: @FABChinaLatam | @REvanEllis
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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, they discuss how China's maker movement inspired the Party leadership to encourage tech entrepreneurship, how Shenzhen rose to such prominence in technology production, the fetishization of the shanzhai movement, and much more.
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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 better known still as Albright Stonebridge Group. Paul provides a broad and very deep overview of the strategic importance of semiconductors in U.S. national security considerations — and how our current policy toward China might actually be working at cross-purposes to actual national security needs.
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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 the eclipse of the "wet-market" theory of COVID origins and its replacement by the "lab-leak" theory illustrates how an old racial form — "Orientalism," which sees countries of Asia as backward, dirty, and barbarous — gave way to what's been termed an "Asiatic" racial form, which reflects anxiety over Asians as hyperproductive, robotic, and technologically advanced.
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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, about her wonderful new book Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern.
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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 and Taiwan specialist at the University of Zürich. They talk about President Joe Biden's recent "gaffes" that call into question the longstanding, unofficial U.S. policy of "strategic ambiguity," talk about how Taiwan has been impacted by the Ukraine War, and much more.
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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, who joined us on the show in December 2020 to talk about his book Champion's Day, is the author of one of the most widely-read columns that SupChina runs: This Week in China's History. In honor of two full years of contributions, with over 100 columns, Kaiser asked Jay to talk about his process, his purpose, and the challenges and the rewards of writing this excellent column.
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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 of mental health in Chinese cities under lockdown. Unsurprisingly, mental health disorders like anxiety and depression have been exacerbated under conditions of isolation and food insecurity. Surprisingly, there's a silver lining or two to the whole thing.
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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, like the news that Vladimir Putin had requested military aid from Xi Jinping, leaked just before National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan's meeting in Switzerland with State Councillor Yang Jiechi and just three weeks after Russia's invasion; and the news that China had tested a hypersonic glide craft in October of last year. But the focus of the discussion is on the Biden administration's China policy and its Indo-Pacific Economic Framework — an Asia strategy that, by all accounts, has met with a tepid response in the region.
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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 Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict. Mark talks about how despite the bright promise that increasing connectedness, whether in trade, in telecommunications, or in individual mobility, would usher in a world of better mutual understanding and enduring peace, the reality is that this connectedness has made the world more fractured and fractious. He explains how the three "empires of connectivity" — the U.S., China, and the EU — each leverage their extensive connectivity to advance their own interests. He also unpacks his assertion that the world is coming to share China's longstanding ambivalence toward connectedness.
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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 the U.S. Embassy in Beijing from 2003 to 2007 — arguably the peak years for collaboration in science — she has ample firsthand experience with the relationship. Debbi, who is now an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University in Philadelphia, relates the U.S. decision to dismantle what was a diverse and fruitful regime of collaboration to the American conception of the relationship as one of teacher and student and sees the American obsession with intellectual property protection as fundamentally misguided and inapplicable to scientific collaboration, which rarely dealt with commercial IP.
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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 Goldfarb, head of global research at RIWI Corp, an innovative web-based research outfit headquartered in Toronto. They discuss a survey commissioned by the Carter Center to look at Chinese attitudes toward the Russo-Ukrainian War: whether Chinese people believe supporting Russia to be in China's interest, what they believe China's best course of action to be, and whether they're aware of — and if so, whether they believe — disinformation pushed by Moscow about U.S.-run bio labs in Ukraine. Danielle also discusses other survey research that RIWI has conducted about China that relates to the war in Ukraine.
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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 Foreign Relations and associate professor of political science at Boston University; and Manoj Kewalramani, chairperson of the Indo-Pacific Research Programme and a China studies fellow at the Takshashila Institution, a leading Indian public policy education center. They offer fascinating analysis and insight into the complex relationship between China and India in light of the Russo-Ukrainian War, as powerful and populous Asian nations caught between their commitments to Russia and their well-founded fear of alienating the West. Their predicaments, however, are about all they have in common: despite Chinese overtures, New Delhi and Beijing have too much historical baggage, too many open wounds, and visions for a post-war geopolitical map that are too divergent to allow them to make anything like common cause.
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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 on the underlying tensions and potential conflicts between Russia and China, the "dialogue of the deaf" that was the China-European Union summit on April 1st, Beijing's failure to understand the European perspective on Ukraine, and China's diplomatic and developmental policies in the Global South.
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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 Chang Che, who flew back to Shanghai in early March and emerged from quarantine just in time for "dynamic clearing." He gives us a first-hand look at the scramble for basic food, and offers his take on China's vaunted state capacity, the role of neighborhood committees in implementing central government policy, what went so badly wrong in Shanghai, and what lessons might be learned for the next Chinese city that sees an Omicron outbreak.
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In a show taped on March 23, Chinese foreign policy expert Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, and former national intelligence officer for East Asia Paul Heer join Kaiser for a discussion of possible scenarios that China might face in the eventual aftermath of the Russo-Ukrainian War.
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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 diplomat. Susan makes a compelling case for the importance of diplomacy in the U.S.-China relationship — and the alarming absence of real diplomacy over the last several years. She helps interpret American and Chinese diplomatic engagements over the Russo-Ukrainian War and assesses the prospects for China actually playing a role in the negotiation of an end to the conflict.
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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 ongoing war in Ukraine that began on February 24 with the Russian invasion. He concludes that while Beijing's short-term alignment with Russia is fairly locked in and unlikely to shift soon, the long-term prospects for the partnership are far less certain. Kaiser and Dingding discuss where Russian and Chinese worldviews are congruent, the unlikelihood that China will put itself forward as some kind of mediator in the war, and domestic linkages to the Russo-Ukrainian 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 the Cambridge Elements series called Chinese Soft Power. A native Russian speaker who also reads and speaks Chinese, Maria has been a keen observer of China's response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and offers her perspectives on Chinese media coverage of the war and the impact of China's pro-Russian tilt on Beijing's soft power ambitions. She recently co-authored a piece in The Atlanticarguing that China's apparent pro-Russian position is about one thing only: the United States, and China's opposition to American unipolar hegemony.
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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 the Paulson Institute, and (during the second George W. Bush administration), Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs under Condoleeza Rice. Evan offers a very compelling analysis of the difficult position that Beijing now finds itself in after Putin's invasion of Ukraine — caught on the horns of a dilemma and unable to resolve conflicting commitments to, on the one hand, territorial sovereignty and, on the other, opposition to American unipolar hegemony. Meanwhile, Beijing is fearful of the repercussions of siding with Russia, fearing that sanctions may have a real bite. Evan also shares his thoughts on how China and Russia differ significantly in their posture toward the "rules-based international order," on misguided thinking about Taiwan and the "strategic triangle," and on the reshaping of the geopolitical and geoeconomic order that the Russian invasion of Ukraine will usher in.
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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 years of the Obama presidency, until 2011. Now a senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, Jeff was deeply involved in U.S.-China affairs at the State Department from his first posting to Beijing back in 1981 through the next 21 years, through 2002. He 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."
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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 2016 to mid-2021. In a wide-ranging conversation, he offers insights about his postings at AIT in Taiwan in the aftermath of the Sunflower Movement, the APEC meeting in Hangzhou, and the vicissitudes of Sino-American diplomacy during the turbulent Trump years.
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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 and Why It Matters. The book offers an accessible overview of China's literary scene, from better-known writers like Mò Yán 莫言 and Yán Liánkē 阎连科 to writers working in fiction genres like crime and sci-fi, and from migrant worker poets to the largely anonymous legions of writers churning out vast amounts of internet fiction. Megan talks about the burden of politics in the life of writers, the wild popularity of dānměi耽美 (gay-male-themed web fiction), and the surprising streak of techno-optimism in Chinese science fiction.
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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 now framing the contest between the U.S. (or, more broadly, "the West") and China in terms of ideology, it makes sense to examine what "ideology" means to each party, to get a sense of what China's actual ideology consists of, and how Chinese people understand their own ideological positioning relative to concepts like "left" and "right" that are familiar in the West. Wu's research yields some very surprising results: In most countries that have been studied, the degree of ideological constraint — coherence or consistency among different issue positions — tends to be higher among people with greater knowledge of politics. But in China, as with so many other things, just the opposite appears to be true.
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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 runs ChinaLawTranslate.com, a Wiki-style resource for translations of Chinese laws and regulations and an invaluable resource not just to legal scholars but to anyone interested in understanding China's policy direction. In a wide-ranging conversation, Jeremy talks about why the law remain important despite frequent assertions that there is no rule of law in China, critiques the "techno-authoritarian" narrative on China, and offers an informed take on the much-maligned "social credit system." Jeremy's work on the social credit system has earned him a reputation as a debunker, and in this episode, he makes clear what the system is and is not.
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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 draws on extensive survey research that examines both political attitudes and personalities among Chinese participants and finds a strong correlation between political discontent and "isolating personality traits," like introversion, disagreeableness, and lack of close personal ties with others. Rory and Kaiser discuss the paper, the fascination with authoritarian resilience among Rory's cohort of China scholars, and the fertile intersection of psychology and politics.
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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 have become something of an institution: wide-ranging, insightful, and always contentious, his missives are read by a great many observers of contemporary China and spark some lively conversations. This year's letter contrasts the major megacities that Dan has lived in (Beijing, Shanghai, and the "Greater Bay Area" of the Pearl River Delta), examines Xi Jinping's efforts to shift the energies of China's technologists and entrepreneurs away from the consumer internet and toward deep tech, ponders the causes of China's "cultural stunting" and the challenges that China faces, and has not yet overcome, in creating cultural products that the rest of the world wants, and warns of the dangers of focusing only on China's weaknesses and problems and ignoring its prodigious capabilities. Tune in for a fascinating conversation with one of the Sinosphere's more original thinkers.
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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser kicks off an informal series on "thinking about thinking about China" with a conversation with Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp, co-authors of the book Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why it Matters. While the book focuses on globalization, in which China has been a central actor, it's really a book about ways to approach complex all complex issues — and will equip you with immensely useful ways to conceptualize any number of problems related to China. Please enjoy this fascinating discussion with two brilliant scholars.
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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 — who is not himself a China specialist — has undertaken a sociological study of "China-watchers," and has presented his findings to date in a series of papers as he prepares to publish a book. Focusing on China-watchers as a community, he offers fascinating insights into how they interact to shape the major narratives of "engagement" and "strategic competition."
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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 the property market in China and the likely impact of the slowdown that they predict. Damien also offers advice on what smart China-watchers will be keeping their eyes on in the coming, highly political year in China in the leadup to the 20th Party Congress. And he shares the amusing story of what happened the evening after he last appeared on Sinica way back when.
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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 Technology Review who took a data-centered look at the U.S. Department of Justice's China Initiative and uncovered serious problems: an ill-defined mission, low conviction rates, post hoc efforts to remove cases previously described as falling under the China Initiative, and strong evidence of racial profiling.
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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 on what looked, at first blush, like a significant decrease in Beijing's overall investment commitment. Beijing might be excused for seeing efforts to diminish, tarnish, or counteract China's position in Africa everywhere: Its triannual Sino-African love fest, after all, didn't receive as much attention as two problematic stories: one centering on the alleged Chinese seizure of Uganda's Entebbe Airport, and another claiming that China plans to build a military base in Equatorial Guinea. And then there's the U.S.-led "Build Back Better World" (B3W) initiative, which was launched at the G7 summit in June, and the European Commission's own answer to China's Belt and Road Initiative: the Global Gateway Strategy, which was announced on the final day of FOCAC.
This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy speak with the Nairobi-based development economist Anzetse Were and Eric Olander, host of the China in Africa Podcast. They both have a lot to say about FOCAC coverage, media narratives on China in Africa, and the likelihood that programs like B3W and Global Gateway can move the needle when it comes to China's position on the continent.
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This week, we bring you a selection of the best of our China Stories podcast. Launched in late January this year, we've published nearly 400 narrated pieces from the best English-language media outlets focused on China: Sixth Tone, Caixin Global, The Wire China, Protocol China, The World of Chinese, and Week in China — plus, of course, SupChina. The stories are read by Chinese-speaking narrators who won't badly mispronounce Chinese names and other words. If you enjoy this sampling, please make sure to subscribe to China Stories wherever you get your podcasts.
3:04 – Peter Hessler's last class, published in Sixth Tone, written by He Yujia, and read by Elyse Ribbons
25:07 – Luo Jialing, A.K.A. Liza Hardoon, and the height of global Shanghai. written by James Carter, published in SupChina, and read by John D. Van Fleet
37:22 – QIanlong Emperor: The worst poet in Chinese history?, written by Sun Jiahui, published in The World of Chinese, and read by Cliff Larsen
46:52 – Partners in profit, published by Week in China, and read by Sylvia Franke
52:36 – Shot heard round the world: China's Olympic return, written by Sam Davies, published in The World of Chinese, and read by Sarah Kutulakos
58:32 – China's culture wars, now playing on Bilibili, written by Shen Lu, published in Protocol China, and read by Kaiser Kuo
1:07:23 – I sacrificed 16 years to the mines, as told to Gushi FM in Chinese by Chen Nianxi, translated by Nathaniel J. Gan, published in The World of Chinese and read by Elyse Ribbons
1:34:50 – Family values, excerpted from One Thousand Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei, published in The Wire China, and read by Kaiser Kuo
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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, the Freeman Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). In September, Lizzi and Jude joined Kaiser and Jeremy to discuss the wide-ranging set of regulatory moves by Beijing, touching on many disparate realms of Chinese life — from real estate to renewable energy, and from entertainment to education. But much has happened since then, and as we promised at the end of that episode, we reconvened to discuss the same topic at our NEXTChina 2021 conference on November 10-11. Don't miss this one!
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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 feel about the U.S.? This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Yawei Liu, senior China advisor at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and with Michael Cerny, associate editor of the Carter Center's China Perception Monitor, about a survey commissioned by the center on Chinese attitudes toward the United States and Chinese perceptions of global opinion on China.
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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 Peter Hessler. Pete returned to the U.S. from Chengdu over the summer after his contract at Sichuan University, where he was teaching journalism and freshman composition, was not renewed. His departure sparked speculation about government displeasure at his reporting for The New Yorker — despite earlier criticism that his coverage of China's COVID-19 response had been too favorable to Beijing. Pete joins Kaiser and Jeremy to discuss his latest book, The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, his approach to writing on China, his interactions with his students, and the real reasons for his departure from China.
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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 Shanghai International Mental Health Association and leads the United Family Mental Health Network. George describes how American ideas of psychiatry and psychology have shaped the way Chinese mental health professionals understand mental wellness and mental distress, resulting in the importation of approaches to diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders that may not always be the best fit with China's cultural, sociological, and historical realities.
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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 the Politburo Standing Committee who has not run a province or provincial-level municipality — is believed to have been the thinker behind ideas as central (and as ideologically distinct) as Jiāng Zémín’s 江泽民 signature “Three Represents,” which brought capitalists into the Chinese Communist Party; Hú Jǐntāo’s 胡锦涛 “Scientific Outlook on Development” that focused on social harmony; and Xí Jìnpíng’s “Chinese Dream” that aimed at the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” While much of Wang’s life since he entered government has been hidden from view, his earlier writings contain many ideas that appear to have shaped Party policy across the tenure of three Party general secretaries over a period of nearly three decades, and offer clues about what still might be in store. Kaiser is joined by Joseph Fewsmith III, an eminent professor of political science at Boston University; the intellectual historian Timothy Cheek, professor of history at the University of British Columbia, whose work has focused on establishment intellectuals in the PRC; and Matthew Johnson, principal and founder of the China-focused consultancy AltaSilva LLC, who has studied and written about Wang extensively.
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This week on Sinica, a talk delivered on October 19 by Kaiser at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, as part of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations Town Hall.
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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 and re-shore jobs to the United States? Kaiser chats with two political scientists, Samantha Vortherms of U.C. Irvine and Jack Zhang, director of the University of Kansas’s Trade War Lab, about the paper they recently published with the intention of answering that question. The paper is called “Political Risk and Firm Exit: Evidence from the US-China Trade War.” They share their findings and explore the paper’s policy implications.
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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 Leading the Dragon: How Taiwan Propelled China’s Economic Miracle. Shelley recounts Taiwan’s rise as an export-led powerhouse and one of the Asian Tigers, and explains the wave of Taiwanese SMEs (small and medium enterprises) that transformed China into the factory to the world. She also opens a window on world-class Taiwanese companies like Foxconn, which employs some 15 million people in China and assembles some of Apple’s most iconic and consequential products, and TSMC, the world’s most valuable semiconductor company, and discusses how the island’s business relationship with China has complicated politics in Taiwan.
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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 U.C. San Diego as assistant professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Jacobs School of Engineering. Michael unpacks recent announcements out of Beijing, including Xí Jìnpíng's 习近平 decision to cease all funding for coal-fired power plants outside of China, and explains the linkage between China’s push for non-fossil energy and the recent power shortages that have affected 20 provinces. He also explains China’s new emissions trading scheme, or ETS, and discusses what China still needs to do to meet the ambitious targets set by Xí Jìnpíng last year: reaching peak carbon emissions by 2030, and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060.
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This week, Kaiser chats with Manfred Elfstrom, assistant professor in the Department of Economics, Philosophy, and Political Science at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Manfred’s new book, Workers and Change in China: Resistance, Repression, Responsiveness examines the state’s dynamic approach to handling labor actions — petitions, protests, strikes, and the like — and how it has blended compromise and coercion to address the demands of workers. The book makes an important contribution to a growing body of literature that seeks a deeper understanding of authoritarian governance in China and more generally among autocratic regimes.
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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 recently-published audit of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED), the annual set of high-level meetings with Chinese officials convened during the Obama administration by the U.S. Departments of State and Treasury. The audit’s two lead authors, representing the two organizations behind the audit, National Committee on U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Friends Service Committee, also join the conversation. Rorry Daniels is Deputy Director at National Committee on American Foreign Policy’s Asia program, where she organizes research and Track II discussions on security issues and conflict mediation in the Asia-Pacific. Daniel Jasper is Asia Advocacy Coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee, where his work focuses on China and North Korea. The three make a strong case that, contrary to an emerging bipartisan consensus in the U.S., the policy of engagement actually bore substantial fruit.
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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 Today, and Jude Blanchette, Freeman Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), to talk about the spate of regulatory actions, new rules, and Party-led initiatives that, taken together, we at SupChina have started calling the “Red New Deal.” Can these be understood as different facets of a larger, overarching program to remake China’s economy and society? Or are they better understood as distinct moves by different bureaucracies within the Party-state that happen to coincide in time? Listen in as we try to sort through what it all means.
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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 Security Programs Focused on China: A Survey of the Field.” This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with the report’s lead author, Rosie Levine, and with Jan Berris, long-serving vice president of the NCUSCR, who celebrates her 50th year with the National Committee this month. The report surveyed academic institutions, NGOs, and think tanks about the state of the field of American China studies at a time when relations between the U.S. and China are at their lowest in the five decades since the opening to China began under Nixon. Rosie and Jan review their findings and reflect on the challenges that the NCUSCR faces in these difficult days.
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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 corruption? This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Yuen Yuen Ang, an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan, about her book China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption, which sets out to explain this apparent contradiction. The author highlights the inadequacies of existing measures of corruption, suggests her own alternative means of measuring it, and explains how the prevalence of one particular form of corruption — what she calls “access money” — is something China has in common with the United States in the age of robber barons.
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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 career has run the gamut from investment banking to academia to the leading think tanks. Bill recently weighed in on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s decision to place Esquel, a leading textile manufacturer headquartered in Hong Kong, on its entity list of companies alleged to be using forced labor from Xinjiang, lamenting that “it’s quite possible that the U.S. government has imposed sanctions on the world’s most socially responsible company and one that has been particularly beneficial to the Uyghurs.” Bill also discusses recent essays on other problems in American China policy.
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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 writer and wide-ranging public intellectual, Adam was trained as a Germanist and has focused, in his writings, largely on economic history. His books include The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931, and Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crisis Changed the World. In July, Adam published an ambitious essay titled “Why there is no solution to our age of crisis without China” in The New Statesman, in which he lays out a brief history of China from the crisis of the Qing Empire in the 19th century through China’s “Century of Humiliation” up to the project of national rejuvenation, which has been the focus of Xí Jìnpíng’s 习近平 time in office. Adam talks about why he feels it’s important to occasionally venture outside one’s own field of specialization, as he did in writing on China as a non-specialist; the folly of two oft-cited historical analogies, comparing China with both Wilhelmine and Hitlerian Germany; the importance of comparative history in making sense of contemporary international relations; and America’s difficulty, when it comes to China, in accepting pluralism from anything but a position of dominance.
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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: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy. This highly readable and informative book tells the story of China’s diplomatic corps from its creation ex nihilo under the guidance of Zhōu Ēnlái 周恩来 during the Communist Party’s years in Yan’an in the 1930s and 1940s through the foundation of the P.R.C., the vicissitudes of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and the period of reform and opening up to the current, more assertive, and often pugilistic present under Xí Jìnpíng 习近平. Peter also offers his take on last week’s interview on Sinica with Ambassador Huáng Píng 黄屏, the consul general of China’s New York consulate.
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This week on Sinica, we’re pleased to present a conversation with Ambassador Huáng Píng 黄屏, a veteran Chinese diplomat who has been consul general of China’s New York Consulate since November 2018. He formerly served as China’s ambassador to Zimbabwe, and as consul general of China’s Chicago Consulate. The interview, recorded on July 22, covers a range of topics in U.S.-China relations from human rights to Taiwan, and from COVID-19 to China’s so-called “wolf warrior diplomacy.”
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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 the United Nations. In June, Bill published a paper titled “Reflections on Poverty Reduction in China” for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), raising important questions about China’s claims about poverty reduction but giving due credit for its impressive successes. In the paper, Bill situates the Chinese leadership’s bold push for the eradication of extreme poverty in a historical context, questions Beijing’s use of 1978 as a benchmark for measuring progress in poverty reduction, and offers suggestions for what Beijing must do to make poverty reduction sustainable.
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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 in political science to the politics of contemporary China. In a wide-ranging conversation, they discuss qualitative vs. quantitative approaches and how the debate parallels the debate between the area studies approach to China and the discipline-centered approach, as well as the pitfalls of the current data obsession in the social sciences. They also look at some of Yiqing’s recent scholarship on China’s ideological landscape, and preview a longitudinal comparative study looking at Chinese students at elite universities in China and their compatriots studying in the United States.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Tom Pepinsky and Jessica Chen Weiss, both professors of government at Cornell University, about their recent essay in Foreign Affairs, “The Clash of Systems? Washington Should Avoid Ideological Competition With Beijing.” In that essay, they argue that, despite all the talk of Chinese authoritarianism as an existential threat to American democracy, Beijing is mostly on the defensive, and does not seek to export its political system. This is not to say that American democracy is not under threat: It very much is — but not from China. Tom, a specialist in Southeast Asia, looks at the ASEAN countries and their relations with Beijing to show that ideological affinity is not a predictor of close ties to China. And Jessica offers an update to her influential 2019 essay on China’s effort to “make the world safe for autocracy.”
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Isabella Weber, assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, about her new book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate. Meticulously researched and persuasively argued, her book makes important contributions to our understanding of a critical period in China’s recent history: the decade of the 1980s, when a fierce debate between “package reformers” supporting sweeping price liberalization and gradualists who argued that state participation in the market was critical to dampen inflation and maintain social stability. And it sheds light on the run-up to the student-led demonstrations of 1989.
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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 very own Jeremy Goldkorn, editor-in-chief of SupChina, in a wide-ranging discussion of the Chinese Communist Party on the occasion of its 100th birthday. The three each contributed chapters to a new volume called The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in 10 Lives, edited by Timothy Cheek, Klaus Mülhahn, and Hans van der Ven. Don’t miss this one!
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Yong Cai, associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This episode — the first in-person interview since February 2020 — looks at the results of China’s 2020 census, the announcement of the much-maligned “Three Child Policy” that the Chinese government proclaimed shortly after the results of the census were released, and other measures the Chinese leadership is considering to avoid the demographic crisis it now faces.
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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. This week, Kaiser invites Deborah back to the show to talk about why the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a notion long regarded by virologists as less probable than zoonotic transmission, has burst back into the conversation. Deborah served as the State Department’s Environment, Science, Technology and Health Counselor in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing from 2003 to 2007. She is an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University in Philadelphia.
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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 English-language journalist covering China’s space program. With the successful arrival of the Tianwen spacecraft in Martian orbit and the deployment of the Zhurong Mars rover just three months after the U.S.’s own latest rover, the Perseverance, rolled out onto the surface of the red planet, China has shown that it’s catching up quickly. But China’s space program also comes in for criticism for its opacity and for potentially dangerous practices – like the uncontrolled reentry of a large Long March 5B rocket in early May. Andrew gives the latest on China’s outer space ambitions, including planned missions to Jupiter’s outermost Galilean moon, Callisto, and beyond the edge of our solar system.
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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 Anxious: How Chinese College Students Succeed and Struggle in American Higher Education. Yingyi’s book, which focuses on the specific experiences of Chinese undergraduates, examines the push-and-pull factors that have made studying abroad — and studying in the U.S. in particular — a “new education gospel” for many parents in China. She discusses why after 2006 Chinese students surged into American colleges and universities, and how despite their eagerness to build “cosmopolitan capital” by studying in the U.S., they’ve faced challenges in navigating American higher education.
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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 Mao’s China, now comfortable with playing junior partner to Xi’s China? And has the United States, which in its opening to China demonstrated formidable acuity in managing the “strategic triangle,” now jettisoned that model and its logic? This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Ali Wyne, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group's Global Macro practice, to discuss the motivations, the capabilities, and the strategies of Beijing and Moscow in their dealings with Washington — and with each other.
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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 – is his first novel. My Old Home: A Novel of Exileis a bildungsroman that follows the life of Li Wende and his father, Li Shutong, from the early days of the Cultural Revolution to the tragedy of Tiananmen in 1989. This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Orville about the windows on China that nonfiction is unable to open but that fiction can; the challenges of writing a novel after a lifetime of publishing nonfiction; and continuity and change in modern Chinese history.
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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 of Justice’s “China Initiative.” Launched under former attorney general Jeff Sessions in November 2018, the China Initiative sought to bring criminal cases against perpetrators of industrial espionage benefiting China, but as Maggie argues, it has in fact resulted in discriminatory ethnic profiling and the criminalization of what she calls “China-ness.” Listen to the end to hear Kaiser’s impression of Cookie Monster as a death metal vocalist.
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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 this week, we bring to you a conversation recorded in November 2020 featuring writer and journalist Zhā Jiànyīng 渣建英 and Geremie R. Barmé, editor of China Heritage. The three discuss the overlooked salience of the words of Han Fei in understanding modern China, the concept of legalism and its relation to the contemporary interpretation of fazhi (法治 fǎzhì), or rule of law, and the churn of being caught between the United States and China as relations between the two great powers continue to sour.
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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 on Climate convened on April 22 and 23. Kaiser chats with China climate policy specialist Angel Hsu, an assistant professor in the Public Policy Department and the Energy, Environment, and Ecology Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Alex Wang, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, and a leading expert on environmental law and the law and politics of China. They provide insights into how China and the U.S. can continue to make progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions even while competing on other fronts.
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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 produced by James Cameron, focuses on Schwankert’s search for the six Chinese men who survived the sinking of the Titanic on the night of April 14, 1912. Tracing the fate of the men takes Schwankert from New York’s Chinatown to the dells of Wisconsin, from Canada to Australia, and from England to Guangdong Province. What his team discovers is the moving story of racial prejudice, the Chinese immigrant experience, and profound personal bravery. Originally scheduled to be released last year shortly after we taped, The Six is now finally out in Chinese theaters, with U.S. release dates to be announced. It marksthe second collaboration between Jones and Schwankert — we discussed their earlier film, The Poseidon Project, with Schwankert on this program in 2014.
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On April 16, PBS’s Great Performanceswill broadcast the world premiere of the documentary Beethoven in Beijing, which tells the story of classical music in China over the last half-century through the lens of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s storied relationship with the country, from its first performances in the P.R.C. in 1973 until its most recent tour, in 2018. Along the way, the film profiles established Chinese musicians and composers like Tán Dùn 谭盾 and Láng Lǎng 郎朗, and introduces us to new Chinese talent, like the composer Peng-Peng Gong 龚天鹏.
This week, Kaiser chats with three individuals involved with the film: co-director Jennifer Lin, a veteran Philadelphia Inquirerreporter and the author of the 2017 book Shanghai Faithful; producer Cài Jīndōng 蔡金冬, a professor of music and arts at Bard College, the director of the US-China Music Institute, and a former conductor of the Stanford Symphony Orchestra; and Sheila Melvin, a script consultant for Beethoven in Beijing and the co-author, along with her husband, Cai, of Rhapsody in Red and Beethoven in China, both books about classical music in the People’s Republic of China.
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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 “Post-90s” generation; and with Alec Ash, author of the book Wish Lanterns, which looks at a cohort of Chinese youth born between 1985 and 1990. The two explore the apparent contradictions between, on the one hand, the cosmopolitanism and socially progressive attitudes of young Chinese today and, on the other, their increasingly assertive national identity.
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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 in Beijing from 2003-2007. She is now Assistant Professor of Political Science at Villanova University in Philadelphia, where she’s currently teaching a course on pandemics and politics. She recalls her first-hand experience with China’s SARS response in 2003, shares her views on how much China improved in the intervening years, and talks about how, when, and why China mishandled its initial response to the novel coronavirus in the winter of 2019-2020. Deborah also offers her critical perspective on the persistent “lab-leak” theory.
This show was recorded on March 12, with an addendum just before recommendations from March 29, in which Deborah addresses some of the news relating to the search for COVID’s origins that came out in the intervening weeks.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats welcomes back Ryan Hass, Armacost Chair at the John L. Thornton Center at the Brookings Institute, Senior Advisor at the Scowcroft Group and Senior Advisor at McLarty Associates, and China Director at the National Security Council during the second Obama Administration. Ryan’s new book, Stronger: Adapting America's China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence, lays out a great approach to right-sizing the challenges that China poses in the decades ahead and identifying a set of sensible U.S. responses: running faster rather than trying to trip the other guy, regaining confidence and avoiding declinism and defeatism, and not turning China into an enemy.
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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 China’s tech ecosystem from a unique perspective — combining an investor’s eye, an academic background studying development, a grounding in Chinese language and culture, and a comparative instinct. Lillian shares her views on how technology platforms have become institutions, how the U.S. and China have responded to this development in starkly different ways, and the major features that distinguish the technology ecosystems of the West and China.
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In August 2020, the CGTN anchorwoman Cheng Lei, an Australian citizen, was detained in Beijing. Six months later, she was formally arrested and charged with violations of China’s expansive state secrets law. This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with ABC reporter Bill Birtles (whose involuntary departure from China was linked to Cheng Lei’s case), longtime Beijing-based Financial Times correspondent Lucy Hornby, and Chinese law specialist Donald Clarke, a professor of law at George Washington University, about the case and its relation to the deterioration of ties between Beijing and Canberra.
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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 the faulty assumptions that American analysts and policymakers continue to make about politics in China — and the flawed policy built on those problematic assumptions. Despite much recent academic research into the behavior of authoritarian states that offer better models for understanding China’s politics, several older and less accurate heuristics persist. Jude deftly skewers these and offers useful approaches to thinking about Xi Jinping and the CCP leadership.
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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 earths — a family of 17 elements that are essential to the function of modern industry and are indispensable in everyday technology. Julie debunks many of the myths surrounding China and rare earths, and lays out her ideas about why, despite the relative ubiquity of mineable rare earth deposits, China has dominated production of these vitally important minerals for decades.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Wall Street Journalcorrespondent Te-Ping Chen to talk about her just-released collection of short fiction, Land of Big Numbers: Stories. Featuring 10 short stories all set in China or featuring Chinese characters, it showcases both the author’s keen eye for detailed observation and her imaginative powers and offers an unfailingly empathetic look at China from a wide range of disparate angles. Te-Ping even reads a passage from one short story, “Lulu,” which was previously published in The New Yorker.
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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 ran for 14 hours on Saturday, February 6. The room, called “Is there a concentration camp in Xinjiang?,” brought thousands of listeners from China and around the world to talk about the ongoing extralegal internment of Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang. We spoke with the Han Chinese filmmaker who started the room (and wishes to remain anonymous); one of the main moderators, the journalist Muyi Xiao of the New York Times; and Rayhan Asat, a Uyghur attorney in the U.S. whose brother, a successful tech entrepreneur, has been put in the camps and has been incommunicado for three years.
Recommendations:
Jeremy: The Ministry for the Future: A Novel, by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Rayhan: The Queen’s Gambit, available on Netflix.
Muyi: A type of Wuhan hot dry noodle: 想念武汉热干面 (xiǎngniàn wǔhàn règānmiàn), available for purchase on Yamibuy.
L: The 2012 film No, directed by Pablo Larraín.
Kaiser: The book Land of Big Numbers: Stories, by Te-Ping Chen.
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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 Bloomberg. Combining firsthand knowledge of China’s tech sector with broad erudition and a humanist’s perspective, Dan offers a unique take on China’s innovation ecosystem, the country’s efforts to achieve self-sufficiency in technology, and the role of economic growth, fundamental optimism, and inspiration in China’s rise as a tech power.
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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 new Biden foreign policy team as it navigates the U.S.-China relationship. Paul is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the National Interest and studies Chinese and East Asian issues. He served as the national intelligence officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015, and was previously a senior analyst at the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence in its China Issue Group. In December 2020, Paul published two articles about Taiwan policy in The National Interest: “The Strategic Dilemma of Taiwan’s Democracy” and “The Inconvenient Truth About Taiwan’s Place in the World.” This episode’s conversation centers on the diagnosis and recommendations made in those two pieces.
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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 D.C.-based think tank that advocates restraint in U.S. foreign policy. Michael D. Swaine, Jessica J. Lee, and Rachel Esplin Odell authored the report Toward an Inclusive & Balanced Regional Order: A New U.S. Strategy in East Asia, which was published by the Quincy Institute on January 11. In this longer-than-usual episode, they detail their recommendations for how they believe the Biden-Harris administration should approach the region, especially China.
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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 for people working in the legal professions in China, but also for researchers interested in what the court decisions can tell us about Chinese jurisprudence, criminal and civil procedures, and Chinese society more broadly. This week on Sinica, we present a show recorded back in December 2019 — prelapsarian days, before shelter-in-place orders, travel restrictions, and remote podcasting. Kaiser speaks with Rachel Stern, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law and in the UC Berkeley political science department, and with Ben Liebman, a professor of law and the director of the Center for Chinese Legal Studies at Columbia University. Both scholars have worked extensively with the database, and share their insights into why the Chinese government has pushed courts to upload cases to the database, and how it might transform the way that courts work in China.
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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 incoming Biden administration will take when it comes to managing the American relationship with China — the most difficult and most consequential of bilateral relationships. Thoughtful and measured as always, Ryan makes a good case for why the Biden team is not, in fact, boxed in by Trump’s antagonism toward China, and will chart a path that will diverge substantially from the one taken during four years of Trump without retreading the path taken during the Obama presidency.
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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 Jeremy set out to answer that question, and are joined by journalist Ian Johnson of the New York Times and by Lin Yao, a political scientist now earning a law degree at Yale, who writes frequently on Chinese intellectuals and U.S. politics.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with James “Jay” Carter, a professor of history at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, about his terrific new book, Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai, which focuses on horse racing as an unlikely but effective way to tell the story of Shanghai during the Nanjing decade (1928–1938) and World War II. We also talk about the challenges of presenting Chinese history to non-specialists, and about Jay’s weekly column in SupChina, “This Week in China’s History.”
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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 in Washington, Beijing, and New Delhi on a dynamic region that encompasses both East Asia and South Asia. Evan also served as deputy assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian Affairs under Condoleeza Rice during the second George W. Bush administration, and as vice chairman of the Paulson Institute, before joining Carnegie. Evan offers his unique perspective on how American policy over the last two decades has failed to keep up with changes happening in Asia, and how the increasing economic integration of the region has meant that the U.S. faces the threat of marginalization and relegation to a unidimensional role as a security provider. He offers useful ideas that the incoming Biden administration would do well to consider.
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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 reported from China for The Hinduand India Todayuntil 2018. The two chatted with Kaiser and Jeremy as part of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival in November, covering subjects from popular Chinese misconceptions and stereotypes about India to India’s curiosity about — and sparse media coverage of — its powerful neighbor to the northeast.
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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 and Judith Shapiro, co-authors of a new book called China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet. Li, an assistant professor of environmental studies at NYU Shanghai, and Shapiro, the chair of the environmental politics program at American University, tackle the question of whether a state-led authoritarian approach is needed to address the crisis of global warming and other looming ecological catastrophes. And while their focus is on the environment, the book interrogates more broadly the whole technocratic authoritarian approach to governance, with relevance to pandemic response, population policy, and much more.
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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 of history and Middle Eastern studies at Whitman College and the author of The Chili Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography. Kaiser — who is something of a chili head himself — chats with Brian about how, when, and why the chili pepper came to China and became such a fixture of the cuisines of Sichuan, Hunan, Guizhou, and Yunnan.
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This week on Sinica, we present the first installment in a three-part series produced in cooperation with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), highlighting the groundbreaking work of young social scientists who are focused on China. In this episode, Kaiser chats with Jennifer Pan, an assistant professor of communication at Stanford, about three of her research papers that illuminate different aspects of social control in the P.R.C.: the use of the dibao social welfare system, hiring decisions, and the use of clickbait headlines by government officials on social media.
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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 the director of Justice Is Global, a special project of People’s Action that is building a movement to create a more just and sustainable global economy and defeat right-wing nationalism around the world. Jake is a Postdoctoral Global China Research Fellow at Boston University's Global Development Policy Center. He is currently researching the emergence of great power conflict between the U.S. and China following the 2008 financial crisis and how new strategies for global development could resolve those tensions. The three talk about whether the “tankies” bring anything to the conversation, whether a Biden presidency is likely to move U.S. policy off the current trajectory toward conflict with China, and how human rights should be considered in drafting progressive China policy.
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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 tells stories of chivalrous martial artists with supernatural abilities — to global audiences through comics, graphic novels, and films. The son of renowned martial arts novelist Shiao Yi (蕭逸 Xiāo Yì), who passed away in 2018, Peter wants to create a wuxiastoryverse that will be to Chinese martial arts literature what the Marvel Comics Universe has been to the superhero genre. Read more about Peter’s Immortal Studios at https://www.immortal-studios.com/.
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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 Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century. The book examines how each of the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (except Brunei) has coped with China's rapid reemergence as a regional superpower, and offers superbly written on-the-ground reportage by a longtime resident of the region.
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Since February, a series of tit-for-tat restrictions and expulsions of journalists in the U.S. and China have resulted in the decimation of the ranks of reporters in the PRC. While the bureaus of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post remain open, they've had to make do with reduced staff and journalists reporting from outside of the Chinese mainland – in Taiwan, and in South Korea. Emily Feng, reporter with National Public Radio (NPR), is one journalist who's still in Beijing. She tells us about how the expulsions have impacted morale, and the ability to report on China.
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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 Region with Mandarin — and how people both in Inner Mongolia and in Mongolia are pushing back. We're joined by Christopher Atwood, one of the nation's leading specialists in Mongolian history and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and by Christian Sorace, an assistant professor of political science at Colorado College.
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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 Century China Center at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at University of California, San Diego, is on Sinica this week. Jeremy, Kaiser, and Susan take a broad look at the bilateral relationship as the U.S. inches toward a presidential election in November.
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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 my mother and I became Chinese propaganda. The three talk about the experiences that informed her writing, her mother, and how this piece has been received in the United States and abroad.
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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 to a worldwide audience. Today, in honor of the 500th episode, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with the show’s co-founders, Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden, about its history and the major trends in Sino-African relations that they've seen in a decade of focusing on China's expanding presence in Africa.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Keisha Brown, Mark Akpaniniyie, and Leland Lazarus about initiatives they're involved in to increase black representation in China-related fields. Keisha Brown is a historian of modern China who is assistant professor in the Department of History, Political Science, Geography, and Africana Studies at Tennessee State University. Mark Akpaninyie is a researcher focusing on China's Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese investment abroad, and China-Africa relations, and Leland Lazarus is a foreign service officer stationed in Barbuda, who recently joined Sinica for a discussion on China's influence in the Caribbean.
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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 Xi Jinping’s goal of eradicating extreme poverty in China by the end of this year. They are joined by two guests: Qín Gāo 琴高 is a professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work and the founding director of the Columbia China Center for Social Policy. She is a leading authority on China’s social welfare system and published a book titled Welfare, Work, and Poverty: Social Assistance in China. Matthew Chitwood, who spent two years researching rural poverty in the remote mountain village of Bangdong in Yunnan Province, brings an on-the-ground perspective on poverty alleviation. He is currently writing a book based on his field research.
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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 Allyson Toy, his manager, a Chinese American who has worked on cross-cultural music promotion and lived in Shanghai for a few years before returning to the U.S. in 2018. In a wide-ranging discussion, they look at hip-hop’s development in China, its relationship with African-American culture, and the travails of bridging two worlds as a Chinese-American hip-hop artist.
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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 focuses on the U.S. response to growing Chinese influence in the Caribbean — an area that the U.S. has long considered its backyard, and a region that is home to many of the states that still maintain diplomatic relations with the Republic of China or Taiwan.
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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 August 1, 2020. Kaiser and Susan discuss the value of American diplomacy with China and if such engagement can help salvage what remains of a deeply strained bilateral relationship between China and the United States.
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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 Changed the World, about the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the U.S. and China, and how it has affected their position in the emerging geopolitical contest.
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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 MP and chief secretary to the Treasury of the United Kingdom. Sir Danny gives an overview of how Asia’s financial sector has been impacted by COVID-19.
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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: How the Battle Between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War.
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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 Group. They explore and explain the complexities of the 5G ecosystem, challenges to cybersecurity on 5G networks, the process of standards setting in advanced telecommunications, and how the Trump administration's animus toward Huawei might ultimately handicap the U.S. in this vital emerging technology.
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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 in the mountains between China and India. To help guide a discussion on this landmark event in China-India relations, Kaiser welcomes back Ananth Krishnan, a longtime correspondent for The Hinduwho is based in Beijing. Ananth discusses the context of the clash, which pits two massive, nuclear-armed states with increasingly nationalistic populations and growing regional ambitions against each other, and assesses the prospects for a settlement of the long-standing border dispute.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser speaks with Michael Berry, translator of the Wuhan-based writer’s controversial Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City. Michael discusses Fangfang’s body of work and how her daily online posts made her — and him — a target for critics who’ve denounced the diary as an act of national betrayal and have even leveled threats against both the author and the translator. Michael Berry is professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies and director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA.
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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 Beijing, Tom wrote for the Wall Street Journal before joining Bloomberg as chief Asia economist. His book argues that Beijing's leaders have learned valuable lessons from their own history and from the experiences of other countries, and applied them well to China's own economy.
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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, when he chatted with Margaret (Molly) Roberts, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. Molly also co-directs the China Data Lab at the 21st Century China Center, and her latest book,Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall, takes a deep, data-driven look at the way that internet censorship functions, and how it impacts Chinese internet users.
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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: The Chinese History of the World. The book sets out to present world history as China has understood it, and what that understanding of history tells us about what the China of today really wants.
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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 right — and wrong — about the outbreak of COVID-19 in China, and the concerning parallels between 2002 and 2020.
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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 exceptionalism, the poverty of strategic thinking in Washington, and the view of U.S.-China competition from the rest of the world. His latest book, Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy, is a bracing read, unsparing in its criticisms of Chinese and American strategic blunders, and its tough-love approach is sure to rankle.
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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 latest book, Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy. It’s a bracing read, unsparing in its criticisms of Chinese and American strategic blunders, and its tough-love approach is sure to rankle. Part 2 will run next week.
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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 is also the Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities and the senior associate vice provost for undergraduate education. In this prelapsarian podcast, taped on December 19, Gordon chats with Kaiser about the rising tide of Sinophobia — presaging things to come once Trump really started fanning the flames during the present pandemic.
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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. Concerns over security issues may end successful programs by the Department of the Interior and other agencies using Chinese-made drones for a huge range of purposes. Brendan Schulman, vice president for public policy and legal affairs of leading Chinese drone maker DJI, joins Kaiser and Jeremy to discuss.
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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 watching the coronavirus pandemic unfold — first at a familiar distance in Wuhan, then up close in the U.S., where she now resides. In this episode, Jiwei joins Kaiser and Jeremy to discuss her experiences.
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For our 10th anniversary show, Kaiser and Jeremy recorded live on Zoom, sharing some reminiscences, reflecting on how China and the podcast have changed in the years since they started the show, and taking questions from listeners. A video version of the podcast will be available soon on SupChina.com.
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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 about China's strategy in the resource-rich but economically devastated Venezuela. Parsifal is a co-founder of the Andres Bello China-Latin America Research Foundation and a foreign policy adviser to Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó.
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In a show taped in late February, Kaiser chats with Barbara Finamore, senior attorney and senior strategic director for Asia of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who shares her perspective on China's impressive progress in curbing greenhouse gas emissions, in reducing the price of renewable energy, and in producing electric vehicles. Tune in for a rare bit of optimism in these tough times!
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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 break from thinking about the virus to listen to Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, talk about why China requires a very different foreign policy approach than Russia.
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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 Factory, and the Future of the World.
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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 Michael Berry, a professor at UCLA and a leading expert on Chinese cinema. They discuss how politics and other factors have taken the shine off the initial promise of U.S.-China film collaboration, but how some bright spots remain.
This episode is part of the California series of podcasts, made possible by the Serica Initiative.
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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 who now serves as president of the U.S.-China Business Council. Topics include the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on U.S. businesses with China exposure, the major issues plaguing American companies, the phase one trade deal inked in January, and more.
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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 law. Just back from the COP25 meeting in Madrid, Alex provides an informed and dispassionate assessment of China’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
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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 later, songs have inspired and united people in protest and political movements in China. In this episode, Kaiser chats with Jeff Wasserstrom of the University of California, Irvine, about the anthems that have animated activism, and about Jeff’s new book, Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink.
The episode is part of the Serica Initiative’s series of California-based podcasts.
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In a live show taped at the Asia Society in partnership with ChinaFile, Kaiser talked with prolific author Mara Hvistendahl at the launch event of her latest book, The Scientist and the Spy: A True Story of China, the FBI, and Industrial Espionage. Written in the style of a thriller, this page-turner is well researched, admirably balanced, and incredibly timely.
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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 Cobus van Staden.
The United States sees Africa as a key arena to confront China's rising influence in the developing world. With its $60 billion International Development Finance Corporation and its Prosper Africa policy framework unveiled last year, the Trump administration is working hard to present African governments with an alternative development model. The problem is that U.S. officials don't have a lot to show for their efforts.
This week, the China in Africa Podcast explores the complex U.S.-China-Africa relationship with two of Washington's leading experts on the issue. W. Gyude Moore is a visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development and the former public works minister of Liberia and Aubrey Hruby is a senior fellow at the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council.
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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 Governance roundtable series. In addition to his role at CFR, Yanzhong is also a professor at Seton Hall University’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations, making him an ideal guest to talk about a pathogen with major domestic and international political implications.
Recommendations:
Jeremy: Three pieces from SupChina: Kenyan students in Wuhan plead for evacuation, by April Zhu; The disappearance of Perhat Tursun, one of the Uyghur world’s greatest authors, by Darren Byler; and Chinese moms in America’s illicit massage parlors, by Teng Chen.
Yanzhong: Two movies, Outbreak and 28 Days Later.
Kaiser: The subtle muckrakers of the coronavirus epidemic, by Maria Repnikova.
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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 — approach China policy. This week, Kaiser chats with eminent scholars Susan Shirk and Barry Naughton of the University of California, San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, and asks them how they would advise the future occupant of the Oval Office.
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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 a senior advisor to the Penn Biden Center. Jeff previously served as Special Assistant to President Obama, Senior Director for Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf States on the National Security Council, and Deputy National Security Advisor to Vice President Biden.
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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 took part as independent observers. Maggie and Kaiser also discuss domestic Taiwanese politics, the impact of demographic and social trends within the context of the election, and cross-Strait relations in 2020.
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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 Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) and also a leading expert on Chinese national security and defense modernization. This show is part of a nine-part series of shows taped in California in December 2019, made possible by the Serica Initiative, SupChina's nonprofit arm.
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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 Canada's assistant deputy minister for Asia Pacific, about the ongoing Hong Kong protests and the spread of violence to some of Hong Kong's best-known universities in November. Alejandro offers his take on this phase of the protests, and on how half a year of incessant protests has impacted the mental health of young Hongkongers.
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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, Qiming has been one of the most successful VCs in China, investing in numerous companies that have gone on to become household names in the country. Gary reflects on his years in China and the folly of decoupling.
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Gary Locke served as U.S. Ambassador to China from 2011 to 2014. Locke was not only the first Chinese-American ambassador to China, but also the first Chinese-American state governor and Secretary of Commerce. This week on Sinica, he joins Kaiser in a show taped in Seattle, Washington. He reminisces about his early visits to his ancestral village in China's Guangdong Province, recalls the attempted defection of Chongqing police chief and erstwhile Bo Xilai underling Wang Lijun to the Chengdu Consulate, and provides rare detail about the flight of blind dissident lawyer Chen Guangcheng to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
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In a show taped at SupChina's NEXT China conference, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with particle physicist Yangyang Cheng, one of the boldest new voices writing on science and contemporary China. Get to know the woman behind SupChina's Science and China column.
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Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, the China reporter for Axios and the lead reporter of an explosive piece that details the Chinese government's ongoing oppression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, is our guest this week. Her report, titled Exposed: China’s Operating Manuals for Mass Internment and Arrest by Algorithm, exposes what she describes as a "manual for operating the camps," and reveals how Chinese police are using big data to imprison those deemed dangerous in Xinjiang.
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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 shut its doors this month, the Royal Asiatic Society of Beijing sponsored a debate over a simple proposition: The Ming was better than the Qing. Four seasoned China watchers battle it out for dynastic supremacy. Who will prevail?
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In a podcast taped live for the Asia Society of Switzerland in Zurich, Kaiser is joined by Kristin Shi-Kupfer, head of public policy and society research at The Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) in Berlin, and Evgeny Morozov, contributing editor at the New Republic and the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom and To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. They discuss the shifting narratives about the relationship between technology and authoritarian politics, and how these shifts have been affected by China's rise as a technology power.
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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 classic book on Sichuan cookery, containing 70 new recipes. She joins Kaiser and guest host Jim Millward of Georgetown University in a discussion of this wildly popular cuisine — and how to get started as a Sichuan chef in your own kitchen.
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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 and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Has philanthropy kept pace with the growth of wealth? And how have charities fared under Xi Jinping and China's new laws governing NGOs and charity?
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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 Chinese law. We explore the legal foundations for the Hong Kong handover in 1997, and how imprecision has contributed to many of the difficulties playing out in Hong Kong's streets today.
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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 — about popular support for the Chinese political leadership. After we discount for censorship, propaganda, and “patriotic education,” how much “natural” regime support is left, and what accounts for it?
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Samm Sacks, 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, Beijing’s long march to technological self-reliance, and the growing U.S. Commerce Department Entities List. This episode was recorded live at the Columbia China and the World Forum 2019, on September 28, 2019 at Columbia University.
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Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, joins Kaiser for a discussion of the ongoing Hong Kong protests, possible U.S. responses, Beijing's puzzling inaction, the perspectives of mainland Chinese, and media coverage of ongoing events in Hong Kong.
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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: How can the United States live with a rising China, an ideologically different country that is home to one-fifth of humanity? Joe Kahn, managing editor of the New York Times and the paper’s former Beijing bureau chief, moderates the discussion with Ezra Vogel, the eminent Harvard University professor and author, and Orville Schell, author and director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society.
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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 longform piece for the FT, Fear and oppression in Xinjiang: China’s war on Uighur culture, and dive into the policy drivers behind the assimilation efforts being carried out by the central government in Xinjiang, and his experiences while reporting from the region.
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The Sinica Podcast Network is proud to introduce the latest member of our family, Strangers in China. It features the voices of an emergent new China. Dissident voices, outspoken voices, marginalized voices, queer voices. Some are people who just find one aspect of living in China unreasonable, others are people who are rebellious. Some want to push the boundaries creatively, while others are just fighting to be seen. All are uniquely Chinese.
People who think differently can feel out of place in China and we capture that experience. Our perspective: If they live differently, they see Chinese society in a new way. We’re here to listen closely and illuminate their stories.
Subscribe to Strangers in China to hear the voices of a new China. Find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Stitcher, or plug the RSS feed directly in to your favorite podcast app.
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This week, Sinica features a chat taped in March with author Ed Pulford, whose book, Mirrorlands: Russia, China and Journeys in Between, has recently published. Kaiser chats with Ed about the Sino-Russian border and Ed’s anthropological travelogue exploring the border’s past and present.
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On this week’s podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy speak with Andy Rothman of Matthews Asia to get his take on recent events in the U.S.-China trade war. Andy lived in China for over 20 years, and was previously the chief China strategist for the brokerage and investment group CLSA after a long career in the U.S. Foreign Service.
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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 with her recently to hear her ideas on how we should understand what it is that Beijing ultimately wants, on how to right-size the challenges that China poses to the liberal world order, and about the CCP's relationship with its own nationalistic populace.
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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 China and California Collaborate and Compete for Our Future.
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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 business, entrepreneurship, and media, Jeremy shares his views on the latest developments in Chinese business, technology, and politics, and tells personal stories from his 20 years living in China.
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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. The discussion in this episode centers on the book co-authored by Schell and John Delury, Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century, and the role of select members of Chinese intelligentsia in the formation of modern China. This discussion provides a window to understand how much views of China’s relationship with the rest of the world have changed significantly since the interview aired five years ago, as well as some reflection and forecasting that still holds true today.
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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 Ezra Vogel. The letter laid out seven main arguments for why the U.S. should not treat China as an enemy, and not surprisingly, the letter got a lot of pushback from more hawkish China-watchers. This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy talk to Michael Swaine, the primary author of the open letter, about the origins and intentions of the letter and the reactions to it. Michael is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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This week, we speak again with Antony Dapiran, a corporate lawyer in Hong Kong and author of City of Protest: A Recent History of Dissent in Hong Kong, to catch up on the fast-moving events in the former British colony. Antony talks about the occupation of the Legislative Council (LegCo) building by protesters, the curious decision by Hong Kong authorities to allow the occupation of that building — which has usually been a red line, to be defended at all cost — and the support that this seems to have within the broader movement. We also discuss reactions of mainland Chinese to events in Hong Kong and ponder what could come next.
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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. The three have fascinating things to say about why a growing number of people are taking a new interest in their ancestry in China, how their company goes about finding information on the family histories of people even several generations removed from China, and some of the surprising and occasionally scandalous things they unearth when they start digging.
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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 out called Active Defense: China's Military Strategy Since 1949, which examines the changes to the PLA's strategy, why they happen, and why, just as importantly, in some moments when we'd expect major changes in strategy, they don’t happen. Join us for this deep dive into the drivers of strategic change in this emerging superpower.
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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 has become something of a historian of protest in Hong Kong as well as the author of City of Protest: A Recent History of Dissent in Hong Kong (2017). 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. Along with this Sinica episode, we publish an op-ed by Antony on SupChina: What is Hong Kong for?
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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.
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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.
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This week, Kaiser sits down with Jude Blanchette in the Sinica South Studio 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 & Opening impoverishes our understanding of China and its politics.
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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.
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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 He Fan 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 calling 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 why China is more apt to respond more positively to multilateral over bi- or unilateral approaches.
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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 Deng Xiaoping and his right-hand man, Zhao Ziyang. Julian describes how Toffler came to the attention of the reformers, and discusses the lasting impact of his influence.
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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 joins Anthony Tao and David Moser at the storied Bookworm on the final night of the Bookworm Literary Festival on March 30 to talk about the Chinese language, comedy, and the difficulties of Chinese soft power.
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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 Xi Jinping's enemies? This question has 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 hopes of settling the question. Kaiser sits 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.”
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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. They discuss 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.
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This live Sinica Podcast recorded in New York on March 6 features Samm Sacks, Cybersecurity Policy and China Digital Economy Fellow at New America. She and Kaiser Kuo discuss the many facets of U.S.-China technology integration and competition, touching on topics including data security, artificial intelligence, and how to build a “small yard with a high fence.”
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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy are joined by Eric Olander, host of the China in Africa Podcast from the China Africa Project; and by Anzetse Were, a developmental economist based in Nairobi. They explore questions related to Kenyan debt and development, as well as Sino-American competition in East Africa.
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This week’s Sinica was recorded at UPenn’s Center for Study on Contemporary China. Jeremy and Kaiser speak with three prominent scholars on China: Sheena Greitens, associate professor of political science at the University of Missouri, Rory Truex, assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, and Neysun Mahboubi, research scholar at the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania. The group tackles a topic that has long beleaguered China-watching circles: self-censorship. In addition, it focuses on a paper that Sheena and Rory published last summer, Repressive Experiences among China Scholars: New Evidence from Survey Data.
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This week, we feature the second half of an extensive interview (first part here) with Shelley Rigger, a political scientist at Davidson College and the leading U.S. expert on the politics of Taiwan. This second half of the interview, which covers the history of Taiwan from the 1990s to the present, was conducted by Neysun Mahboubi of the UPenn Center for the Study of Contemporary China Podcast (one of our favorite China podcasts), and is republished here with the Center’s permission.
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This week, we feature the first half of an extensive interview with Shelley Rigger, a political scientist at Davidson College and the leading U.S. expert on the politics of Taiwan. This first half of the interview, which covers the history of Taiwan through 1996, was conducted by Neysun Mahboubi of the UPenn Center for the Study of Contemporary China Podcast, one of our favorite China podcasts, and is republished here with the Center’s permission.
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This week, Sinica is live from Fordham Law School in New York City! This episode features Zhā Jiànyīng 查建英, journalist and author of China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture and Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China, who joined Jeremy and Kaiser at a Sinica Live Podcast event on January 14. The three discuss the experiences of Zha’s half-brother, Zhā Jiànguó 查建国, a democracy activist in China who was charged with subversion of state power and subsequently jailed for nine years. In addition, they pore over the political realities of contemporary China, the likelihood of reform, and the pressures that “moderate liberals” encounter in the face of rising suppression of political freedoms in the country.
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This week on Sinica, we’re proud to launch the Middle Earth podcast, which discusses China’s culture industry. In this debut episode on the Sinica Network, host Aladin Farré chats with three individuals who have all hit the big time and become internet celebrities in China: Erman, whose musings on love and relationships turned into a viral success and a full-time job; Ben Johnson, an Australian English teacher, whose short videos on cultural differences have attracted millions of views and 3 million followers; and Tang Yiqing, who started Juzi Video and has a venture-backed company with 30 million young fans. Learn their secrets for how to become a wanghong (网红 wǎnghóng; internet celebrity)! Subscribe to Middle Earth on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Stitcher, or plug the RSS feed into your favorite podcast app.
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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Jeremy and Kaiser speak with Tashi Rabgey, research professor of international affairs at George Washington University and director of the Tibet Governance Project. They are joined by returning guest Jim Millward, professor of history at Georgetown University and renowned scholar of Xinjiang and Central Asia. This episode focuses on their respective areas of expertise: human rights violations in the Xinjiang region; the P.R.C. approach to ethnic policies in Tibet and Xinjiang, referred to on this show as minzu (民族 mínzú) policy; and the assimilation and securitization of both regions.
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This week on Sinica, we’re live from the US-China Business Council’s Forecast 2019 Conference in Washington, D.C. This show was recorded on January 31 — the day (and hour) that Donald Trump met with China’s top official in charge of trade negotiations, Liu He. Kaiser and Jeremy spoke with Tim Stratford, the chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in the People's Republic of China, and with Craig Allen, the president of the US-China Business Council. Stratford has also headed the leading law firm Covington’s office in China for many years, while Allen has had a long career representing American economic interests at the Department of Commerce and in the State Department, most recently as the U.S. ambassador to Brunei. The wide-ranging conversation covers everything from technology policies to the structural changes that China is being asked to make to address U.S. complaints over unfair trade practices.
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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with two former ambassadors to the PRC who served during the years marking the transition from the Hu/Wen administration to the rule of Xi Jinping: Jorge Guajardo of Mexico and David Mulroney of Canada. They discuss the significant challenges that they faced, the perceptible changes in China's diplomatic norms and practices during their tenures as ambassadors, and, finally, the benefits and drawbacks that their countries see from the Trump administration's more assertive posture toward China. Note: This show was recorded on December 20, 2018, five weeks before Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sacked the latest ambassador to China.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Ali Wyne, a policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, about the big picture in U.S.-China relations. Are we already in a cold war? Wyne gives a spirited argument that we're not — and makes the case that the interconnectedness between China and the U.S. can still serve as effective ballast in the relationship.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Christina Larson, a science and technology reporter for the Associated Press, about a major story that her team broke: the Chinese scientist He Jiankui’s announcement that he had edited the genes of embryos conceived in vitro, and that twin girls had been born, making them — if his claims are true — the world’s first gene-edited babies. We look at the overwhelmingly critical response to this announcement in the Chinese scientific community, among ordinary people, and among officials, as well as what this may mean for the ethical landscape in Chinese science. Please note that this show was taped in December 2018, and since then, He Jiankui has resurfaced, claiming that he’s doing just fine — so far.
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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy speak with Samm Sacks, Cybersecurity Policy and Chinese Digital Economy Fellow at New America, and Paul Triolo, Geotechnology Practice Head at the Eurasia Group. The two are among the best positioned to discuss the implications of the shocking arrest of Huawei CFO Mèng Wǎnzhōu 孟晚舟 in Vancouver on December 1. The discussion focuses primarily on technological and national security aspects of the clash between Washington and Beijing, how Meng’s arrest fits into that clash, and the realities of fragmentation in the global telecommunications industry.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy speak with Julian Ku, Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Maurice A. Deane Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law at Hofstra University. After the arrest of Huawei Chief Financial Officer Mèng Wǎnzhōu 孟晚舟 in Vancouver at the behest of the U.S. Justice Department dominated international headlines in December 2018, U.S.-China relations have entered uncharted territory. The three convened to discuss the many legal aspects of her arrest and what this means for the bilateral relationship moving forward.
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Jude Blanchette, the Senior Advisor and China Practice Lead at Crumpton Group’s China Practice, joins Kaiser and Jeremy for a live Sinica Podcast recording at Columbia University. Forty years after the policies of reform and opening up were adopted by the Communist Party of China, the three reflect on just how much the country has changed since 1978, and also restore figures like Zhào Zǐyáng 赵紫阳 and Hú Yàobāng 胡耀邦 to their proper place in the story of reform. Jude also talks about the conservative reaction to reform — the topic of his forthcoming book, Under the Red Flag: The Battle for the Soul of the Communist Party in a Reforming China.
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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Jeremy and Kaiser are joined by Benjamin Shobert, who visited the Sinica South studio in Durham, North Carolina, for this episode. He is a senior manager at Healthcare NExT, a healthcare initiative of Microsoft, and leads strategy with national governments. The topic of discussion is his compelling book, Blaming China: It Might Feel Good but It Won’t Fix America’s Economy. The three discuss the taxonomy of dragon slayers and panda huggers, and some realities with which the world is now grappling: the rise of China, outcomes of globalization, the watershed moment of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the impact it has had — and will continue to have — on the bilateral relationship between the United States and China.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser speaks with Charles Bedford, who has been managing director since 2012 of The Nature Conservancy (TNC)’s Asia Pacific region, which encompasses Asia, the Pacific Islands, Indonesia and Australia. The organization focuses on solving incredibly pressing and paramount issues central to the health of our planet. TNC is a charitable environmental organization that focuses on bringing the “best available science” to decision-makers in all levels of government and local communities both inside and outside of the United States.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy speak with Christian Sorace, assistant professor of political science at Colorado College. The three discuss his book, Shaken Authority: China’s Communist Party and the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, which analyzes the ways the Communist Party uses rhetoric to serve its interests, the consequences of this endeavor for the region and survivors of the quake, and the urbanization of China’s rural areas. Christian spent a year and a half in the region from 2012 to 2013 conducting fieldwork in affected areas via open-ended interviews, ethnographic observations, meetings with leaders of non-governmental organizations and scholars, and analysis of hundreds of pages of internal Party reports.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser traveled across the Atlantic to host a live podcast at the Asia Society of Switzerland in Zurich. The topic of discussion is the social credit system (SCS) in China, a fiercely debated and highly controversial subject in the West, often construed as a monolithic and Orwellian initiative. Our guests are Manya Koetse, editor and founder of What’s on Weibo — a wonderful resource that aggregates and examines trending information from social media platform Sina Weibo — and Rogier Creemers, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Leiden, who has done extensive research on China’s governance and digital policy and has translated extensive primary source materials from Chinese government sources and publications on SCS. Rogier and Manya provide fresh perspectives on a subject that has become a wedge in the China-watching community. They discuss the varying perceptions of SCS around the world; what observers have gotten right and wrong about the system according to government publications; the relative lack of integration in the many different moving parts that comprise the SCS; and the changing role of technology in daily life and how big of a role that could play when one thinks of social credit.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser speaks with Lucy Hornby, the deputy bureau chief of the Financial Times in Beijing and a veteran guest on the show. She has appeared on Sinica before to discuss professional representation for women in China, the last surviving comfort women in the country, and domestic environmental challenges. The two discuss shadow banking in China and its history; the cat-and-mouse relationship between regulators and shadow financiers; the advent of fintech and the proliferation of peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms; and Lucy’s reporting on a pyramid scheme involving selenium-infused wheat in Hebei.
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In lieu of Sinica this week, we are proud to announce the newest addition to our network, Ta for Ta, hosted by Juliana Batista. Ta for Ta is a new biweekly podcast, which captures the narratives of women from Greater China at the top of their professional game. “Ta for Ta” is a play on the Chinese spoken language that demonstrates equality between the sexes. Tā 他 is the word for “he”; tā 她 is also the word for “she.” Chenni Xu is the inaugural guest, a corporate communications executive and gender advocate. She moved back to New York after spending nearly a decade abroad in Beijing. Tune in to hear about the #MeToo movement in China and the proponents at the fore, Chenni’s views on gender inequality and professional representation for women, as well as her own experiences as a woman and an Asian American in China. Subscribe to Ta for Ta on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Stitcher, or plug the RSS feed into your favorite podcast app. For more musings and links relevant to this episode of Ta for Ta, check out this post on Juliana’s Medium page. Juliana loves to hear from listeners — send her a message at ta.for.ta.china@gmail.com.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser speaks with the Honorable Kevin Rudd, the 26th prime minister of Australia and the inaugural president of the Asia Society Policy Institute. He is also a doctoral student at Jesus College, University of Oxford, who, through his studies, hopes to provide an explanation as to how Xi Jinping constructs his worldview. Mr. Rudd elaborates on the extent to which the Chinese government’s worldview has changed, the current direction of that worldview, and how much of that can be owed to Xi Jinping and domestic political maneuvering. The two take a deep dive into the state of ongoing flux in the U.S.-China relationship; the now-strategic competition between the U.S. and China; what the new rules for engagement are; Chinese foreign policy transitioning to a more active approach; the most significant changes in the bilateral relationship over the past 12 months; and the current state of Australia-China relations.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser speaks with Danny Russel, career diplomat and former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs from 2013 to 2017, and currently vice president for international security and diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI). The conversation centers on all things diplomatic in East and Southeast Asia: the Trans-Pacific Partnership; internet freedom in China; the country’s “illiberal turn”; espionage and intellectual property theft during his time in Washington; the Obama administration’s position on the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB); and, finally, reflections on the current state of the U.S.-China relationship.
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This week on Sinica, Jeremy and Kaiser speak with Kai-Fu Lee 李开复, who has returned to discuss his new book, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order. Kai-Fu is a prominent member of the international artificial intelligence community and is chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, founded in 2009. Kai-Fu brings to Sinica a wealth of knowledge on topics that have developed into rather large points of contention in the U.S.-China bilateral relationship over the past year: AI and its various usages across a wide range of industries; the “high-octane” nature of Chinese data; tech policy in China, venture capital and its interplay with domestic private companies; the future of China’s AI industry and what that means for the rest of the world; and the nuances of the business and finance aspects of running a technology company in China. Kai-Fu previously spoke about artificial intelligence on Sinica last summer.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy are joined by Nury Turkel, a prominent voice in the overseas Uyghur community and the chairman of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, now based in Washington, D.C. We discussed Nury’s own experiences as a Uyghur and an activist both in China and the United States; the increasingly vocal Uyghur diaspora around the world in the wake of widespread detentions in Xinjiang; the relative absence of state-level pushback outside of China; and the international organizations that advocate for Uyghur rights in China and the accompanying pushback from Beijing. If you aren’t yet up to speed on the deteriorating state of affairs for Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region, take a look at SupChina’s explainer for a comprehensive overview of the reporting of information from October 2017 through August 2018.
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This week, the Sinica Podcast network adds another show: ChinaEconTalk, hosted by Jordan Schneider. In this crossover on Sinica, Jordan discusses "China's Grand AI Ambitions" with Rhodes scholar Jeff Ding. Jeff Ding breaks down how China stacks up to the rest of the world in the race to develop AI. He delves into the connections between Chinese tech companies and government AI targets, AI’s military implications, as well as the ethical considerations of AI applications in China’s police state. Jeff also discusses his recent paper “Deciphering China’s AI Dream,” as well as recent articles on AI he has translated from Chinese media on his ChinAI newsletter. Subscribe to ChinaEconTalk on iTunes, Overcast, Stitcher, or by plugging the RSS feed straight into your podcast reader.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Jude Blanchette of the Crumpton Group, a keen observer of the CCP leadership. We pick his brain on the rumors swirling around Beijing this summer, about public criticisms of Xi’s leadership, about the lack of any real succession plan in the eventuality that Xi is somehow incapacitated or steps down, and an emerging political science literature on authoritarianism.
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This week, Kaiser chats with Paul Haenle, who is Maurice R. Greenberg Director of the Carnegie Tsinghua Center for Global Policy and previously served on the National Security Council as a staffer under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Their conversation — which runs the gamut from North Korea to Taiwan to the Belt and Road — was recorded live at Schwarzman College in Beijing on September 6.
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This week, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Andrew Small, senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, D.C. Andrew is one of surprisingly few scholars with specialized experience researching China's relations with what it calls its "all-weather friend" — Pakistan. His book from 2015 on the subject is titled The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics. Kaiser, Jeremy, and Andrew discuss how Sino-Pakistani ties have been impacted by the recent election of Imran Khan to prime minister, Pakistan's economic difficulties, and the numerous projects that comprise the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, or CPEC – one of the most important components of China's Belt and Road Initiative.
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This week on Sinica, Jeremy and Kaiser chat with Jackson Miller, whose research of illegal trade in Malagasy hardwood led him to discover the bizarre story of an unemployed man from Liaoning who parlayed his kung fu skills into political prominence in Madagascar.
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This week on Sinica, it’s part 3 of Kaiser and Jeremy’s interview with Chas W. Freeman, Jr. This week, Ambassador Freeman talks about U.S.-China military cooperation in the 1980s and discusses some aspects of that cooperation that might really surprise you. He also shares his unconventional take on the “three Ts” – Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen.
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This week, Kaiser and Jeremy continue their conversation with Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (see part 1 here), and focus on how he got interested in China, his fascination with the Chinese language, his early diplomatic career, his extraordinary experience as chief interpreter during Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972, and his prescient predictions of how China would evolve after the normalization of relations with the U.S. Stay tuned for the third part of this interview, coming next week!
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Few living figures of U.S.-China relations are as legendary as Charles W. "Chas" Freeman, Jr., the chief interpreter for Richard Nixon’s world-changing 1972 visit to China, and a former top American diplomat in countries such as China and Saudi Arabia. On this, the first of a two-part Sinica interview, Chas Freeman discusses grand strategy — and the current “strategy deficit” — in U.S.-China relations, as well as technological innovation, nationalism, xenophobia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and many other topics. Recommendations: While waiting for the next part of the interview, check out Ambassador Freeman’s book, Interesting Times: China, America, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige, and also this extensive 1995 interview with Ambassador Freeman done by Charles Stewart Kennedy for The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.
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Today, we’re very proud to present a new podcast in the Sinica network on SupChina. It’s called NüVoices, and it’s a show all about women in China, with a focus on women in media and the arts. It’s hosted by Alice Xin Liu, a translator originally from Beijing, who grew up in the U.K. before coming back to Beijing, and by Joanna Chiu, a Hong Kong Canadian journalist whom you’ve heard on Sinica a couple of times in the last year. Today’s show features Yuan Yang, a correspondent for the Financial Times in Beijing. We hope you like it, that it makes you think – and that you’ll subscribe (iTunes, Overcast, Stitcher, RSS feed). And keep an ear out in the coming weeks as we introduce more great podcasts about various facets of China.
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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Paul French, the bestselling author of Midnight in Peking. Paul has just written an outstanding new book called City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir, in which he tells a captivating story of two foreigners rising to prominence through conducting shady business in the underworld of Shanghai in the 1930s, a chaotic yet fascinating period when the fabled Paris of the Orient was approaching its final years as the realities of the war with Japan finally closed the curtains.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with David Brophy, senior lecturer in modern Chinese history at the University of Sydney and a prominent scholar on Xinjiang, and with Andrew Chubb, a post-doc fellow this year at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program, about the response to China’s alleged influence operations in Australia. David and Andrew were both signatories to one of two “dueling open letters” addressing the issue; the one they signed warned of the dangers of overreaction.
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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Matthew Kohrman, associate professor of anthropology at Stanford University, about his work on China’s tobacco industry – and why China isn’t doing more to curb smoking. His new book on the subject is titled Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing in Critical Historical Perspectives.
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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Stephanie Jensen-Cormier, China Program Director for the NGO International Rivers, about the consequences of China’s aggressive building of large dams and other issues related to rivers in China – and to Chinese involvement in international dam building projects. She shares bad news, but also some surprisingly good news.
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In this week’s episode of the Sinica Podcast, taped live in New York at the law offices of Dorsey and Whitney on June 19, Kaiser and Jeremy chat about DEF CON, the world’s premier hacker convention, which was – to the surprise of many – held in Beijing this May, and sponsored by Baidu. Joining us are Kevin Collier, a reporter for BuzzFeed who reported on the conference from Beijing, and Priscilla Moriuchi, a 12-year veteran of the National Security Agency (NSA) who is now head of nation-state threat security at Recorded Future.
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In this episode of the Sinica Podcast, taped live at the US-China Strong Foundation’s China Careers Summit in Washington, D.C., on May 31, Kaiser talks to former assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs Kurt Campbell about his career, his critique of engagement, and the fascinating events that happened on his watch — including the extrication of blind activist lawyer Chen Guangcheng and the attempted defection of Bo Xilai’s former police chief in Chongqing, Wang Lijun.
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This week’s show was recorded in Prague, where major developments in the continuing saga of a mysterious Chinese company called CEFC, with deep ties to the Czech president, Milos Zeman, unfolded during a recent visit by Kaiser. He spoke with Martin Hala of Charles University in Prague about the rise and fall of CEFC, and what this means not only for China’s efforts to expand its presence in Central and Eastern Europe, but also for China’s Belt and Road Initiative more broadly.
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This week’s Sinica Podcast features Andrew Chubb, a fellow at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program. Andrew writes extensively on Chinese foreign policy, especially topics related to maritime disputes in the South and East China seas, Chinese nationalism, and Chinese public opinion. Kaiser and Andrew discuss the question of how popular nationalism in China impacts and shapes China’s maritime behavior, and why the extent of nationalism's influence on policy is not as large as you may think.
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In this week’s episode of Sinica, Kaiser chats with Bonnie Glaser in a crossover show that will appear both on Sinica and on the ChinaPower Podcast from CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Bonnie is a well-known specialist on China’s security issues, and this week, we tour several locations where the Chinese military has evolving plans: the Korean Peninsula, Japan, the South China Sea, and Taiwan.
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This week on Sinica, we bring you the recording of when Jeremy and Kaiser chatted with film industry legend Janet Yang live at our SupChina Women’s Conference on May 14 in New York City. Janet talks about trends in Chinese film, how she survived as an Asian-American woman in the notoriously sexist Hollywood film industry, the deep cultural differences and surprising similarities between China and the U.S., and some of her current projects. Recommendations: Janet: The Girl at the Baggage Claim, by Gish Jen, who discusses the differences between Eastern and Western culture; When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, by Pema Chodron, a book on failure and resilience; and The Leavers, by Lisa Ko, which explores the lives of a mother and son after the son is adopted. Jeremy: Pleco, an English-Chinese dictionary app with special features, which is fantastic for language learners. Kaiser: The Overstory, a novel comprising many different short storylines rooted in trees.
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This week, it’s a crossover show! Zara and Hans from the terrific 996 Podcast with GGV Capital join Kaiser at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a live recording with Yasheng Huang, professor of economics and management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Yasheng — never known for his delicate pulling of punches — talks about trade, technology policy, and Chinese and Indian entrepreneurship. This episode was recorded on April 7, 2018.
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Today, we bring you a special live panel discussion from the 2018 Harvard College China Forum, on China's international relations. The panelists are: Jiang Changjian – Associate professor of International Studies, Fudan University; Host, “The Brain” (最强大脑 zuìqiángdànǎo) Ira Kasoff – Senior Counselor, APCO Worldwide; Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce Anthony Saich – Professor of International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School; Director, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation The discussion of today's China and its influence in the world often centers around this question: How much has China's foreign policy changed since Deng Xiaoping famously advocated in the 1980s that the country "conceal its strengths and bide its time" (韬光养晦 tāoguāngyǎnghuì), and how much does the recent change originate from Xi Jinping? Our panelists have different interpretations of the question, and address it from many angles, including, of course, the big ones: U.S.-China trade, the Belt and Road, the South China Sea, and the Korean nuclear crisis.
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This week's show was recorded on April 13 at the Yenching Global Symposium in Beijing. Kaiser and our old friend David Moser speak with Virginia Tan — co-founder and president of Lean In China, co-founder of She Loves Tech, and founding partner of Teja Ventures, all organizations working to empower women — about women and work in China. Be sure to check out the White Paper that Lean In China has recently published!
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Hey Sinica Early Access listeners, We’ve got a special treat for you today: The debut episode of a new podcast in our network, which we’re including at the top of this week’s show. It’s called TechBuzz China by Pandaily, and it was created by our friends at the Pandaily, a new China-focused tech news website. We think you’ll love the hosts, Rui Ma and Yingying Lu, who both live in San Francisco and have a great deal of experience in the China tech scene. They’re smart, insightful, and easy on the ears. They’ll be talking about big tech stories in the news each week. We will have all the right links for subscribing to TechBuzz China by Pandaily for you at the time of the public release of this episode of Sinica. This week’s Sinica, with Joanna Chiu of the AFP about how she went undercover to ferret out dealers in endangered wildlife in Hong Kong, follows right after the TechBuzz China podcast, so don’t miss it.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is live at the Princeton US-China Global Governance Forum, where he speaks with Gao Yutong (Tony Gao) about the wunderkind entrepreneur's experience as a Chinese student in the U.S. from age 16 to his present 23. Gao is the founder and CEO of Easy Transfer, which Chinese students use to pay their college tuition from Chinese bank accounts without all the hassle, paperwork, and expensive fees. He talks about his time amidst the cornfields (in his sophomore year of high school, he attended an all-boys Catholic boarding school in Lincoln, Nebraska), his stint as president of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at the University of Southern California, and how students from China might prepare themselves better for the experience of study in the U.S.
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This week's podcast was recorded live at The Bookworm in Beijing, which is why you'll notice the prolonged and decidedly rambunctious audience pop at the start of the show: No matter where Sinica goes, it'll always be most enthusiastically received in the city where it began. Beijing is the best. The entire episode is a hoot, as SupChina Asia managing editor Anthony Tao sat in for Kaiser and Jeremy to talk music with longtime jazz musicians David Moser (no stranger to Sinica listeners) and Jess Meider. Stick around for the musical performance at the end! (This is the song David and Anthony reference at the end, in case it's not obvious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8tZO97uhyE)
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk, both professors at the University of British Columbia, about their translation of Zhang Yingyu's Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection. Anyone who has lived in China in recent decades will understand intuitively why a podcast ostensibly about current affairs in China would want to talk about a 16th century book, but for anyone who doubts the relevance for today's China, we believe it all will become painfully clear as you listen.
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Mao Zedong famously described the relationship between China and North Korea as “like lips and teeth.” But the relationship hasn’t always been quite so cozy. This week on Sinica, Kaiser talks to two scholars of China and North Korea — Ma Zhao, Associate Professor of Modern History and Culture at Washington University in St. Louis, and John Delury, Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. They were both at the Association for Asian Studies Conference in Washington, DC, and they shared their insights into the history of this complicated and often fraught relationship. Please note this was recorded on March 24, a few days before the world learned that Kim Jong-un had traveled to Beijing to meet with Xi Jinping.
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This week Kaiser hosts solo as Jeremy is on holiday. Our guest is Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Chair of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, and the topic is the Chinese Communist Party’s relationship with history: How it controls historical inquiry, manipulates historical knowledge, and even erases historical remembrance.
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Some 350,000 students from China currently attend American universities. Many of them enjoy their experience and return to China with new friends, broadened horizons, and marketable skills. But for others, their experience of America is marred by social isolation, intense political pressure, and racism. On this week’s podcast, recorded live at the China Institute in New York, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Siqi Tu, a graduate student in sociology at the City University of New York looking at Chinese high school students in America; and Eric Fish, author of China’s Millennials, who is now working on a second book about university students from China in the U.S. It’s a wide-ranging conversation that examines some of the problems that Chinese students often face, and some of the problems Chinese students can sometimes create.
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China's President Xi Jinping has set a very ambitious goal: The total elimination of poverty in China by the year 2020. As that date fast approaches, we sit down with Gao Qin, Professor of Social Policy and Social Work, and Director of the China Center for Social Policy at Columbia University. Qin is author of an excellent book on the subject of social assistance in China published just last year called Welfare, Work, and Poverty: Social Assistance in China, which looks at one of China’s most important social assistance programs, Dibao, that covers some 60 million people.
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On this week’s show, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Carl Minzner, Professor of Law at Fordham Law School and specialist in Chinese law, about his new book End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival is Undermining its Rise. No mere litany of the ways in which China has grown illiberal in the time since the Tiananmen crackdown of 1989, the book explores the underlying reasons for China’s hardening and approaches the question with admirable empathy. With the recent announcement of proposed changes to China’s constitution that would end the two-term limit in place since 1982, the conversation around the reasons for the illiberal turn is more urgent than ever. The topic is one that Kaiser and Jeremy have discussed before many times on the show, but Carl brings fresh angles to the conversation, including an exploration of how changes in China’s educational system may be foreclosing social mobility in China.
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