Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica: February 24 marks the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and as I’ve done for the last two years, I moderated a panel organized by Vita Golod, a Ukrainian China scholar who happens to be here in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at UNC as a visiting scholar. She’s worked tirelessly to promote awareness of the war, and I’m honored again to have been asked to moderate this panel.

The guests you'll hear from are:

Dr. Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova, Director of the China Studies Centre at Riga Stradins University in Latvia. Fluent in Chinese, Russian, and English, she has collaborated with scholars like Kerry Brown of King’s College London and has done extensive work on China's role in Europe and beyond.

Dr. Dmytro Yefremov, Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations at the National University "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy" in Ukraine. A board member of the Ukrainian Association of Sinologists, he specializes in China's foreign relations and has traveled extensively to China, providing firsthand insight into Ukraine's perspective on China's role in the war and beyond.

Dr. Qiang Liu, Director of the Energy Economics Division at the Institute of Quantitative & Technical Economics within the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). He also serves as the Co-chair and Secretary-General of the Global Forum on Energy Security. His research focuses on energy security, energy economics, and policy, with a particular emphasis on China's Belt and Road Initiative and its global energy partnerships.

Dr. Klaus Larres, Richard M. Krasno Distinguished Professor of History and International Affairs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An expert on transatlantic relations, U.S., German, and EU foreign policy, and China's role in the post-Cold War order, he has a profound interest in the history of the Cold War and the politics of Winston Churchill.

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This week on Sinica, I chat with David Zweig, a veteran China scholar who is Professor Emeritus from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. We discuss Davis'd latest book, The War for Chinese Talent in America, which looks at Chinese efforts to harness the intellectual firepower of Chinese scientists and engineers who studied abroad, especially in the United States, and bring them — or at least their knowledge —back to China. David's book takes a balanced look at both the very real problems generated by Chinese policies as well as the overreaction by the U.S. Department of Justice in the form of the infamous China Initiative.

3:40 – Why got David interested on this particular topic 

7:07 – The diaspora option

12:09 – The Thousand Talents Program/Plan

18:28 – How the talent programs operate

23:48 – Motivations for Chinese to participate in the talent programs, how geopolitics now impacts these decisions, and what the effect of the China Initiative has been on collaboration 

36:29 – The China Initiative’s climate of fear and the concern for racial profiling 

49:40 – The extent of the validity of U.S. security concerns

57:24 – David’s suggestions for balancing national security interests and open scientific exchange 

Paying It Forward: Dan Lynch and his book, China’s Futures: PRC Elites Debate Economics, Politics, and Foreign Policy

Recommendations:

David: It’s a Wonderful World — The Louis Armstrong Musical in New York

Kaiser: The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection by Tamim Ansary, especially the audiobook read by the author

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I’m delighted to bring you today the first in a series of conversations from a remarkable day-long session put on by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs, or ACF, at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). The session was held on Monday, February 3, and was called “Getting China Right.” On today’s show, we’ve got U.S. Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey, one of the best-informed and sensible legislators focused on China today. He’ll be in conversation with James Steinberg, dean of SAIS, who also served as Deputy Secretary of State from 2009 to 2011. You’ll hear introductory remarks from Jim and from Jessica Chen Weiss, inaugural faculty director ACF and David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at SAIS, who listeners certainly know from her appearances on Sinica. More to come in this series, so stay tuned! Please enjoy Senator Kim’s very thoughtful remarks.

Watch the morning sessions on YouTube here.

The Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) of the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) was established in 2024 to add rigor and reason to public and policy discussions on China and the range of domestic and international issues that intersect China’s global role, bringing together experts and practitioners to foster informed public dialogue, promote evidence-based research, and support the next generation of scholars and practitioners. ACF was founded with the support of Johns Hopkins University and philanthropic contributions from across the United States.

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This week on Sinica, I chat with economic historian Andrew B. Liu of Villanova University about how to understand Trump's thinking on China and tariffs. Andy wrote about this in an excellent piece on N+1 called "Back to the 80s? Trump, Xi Jinping, and Tariffs." Check it out and then listen to the show!

3:59 – How the U.S.’s current trade anxieties echo those of the ‘80s

9:34 – How Cold War geopolitics shaped U.S.-Japan trade relations

18:23 – The lessons China learned from Japan’s experience and how it has shaped its recent economic strategy 

21:03 – What Xi Jinping’s vision for the Chinese economy actually looks like 

34:26 – Why China is favoring a more Ford-like model of industrial structure

41:28 – Michael Pettis’s ideas from Trade Wars Are Class Wars and points of critique 

52:44 – The Trump administration’s use of tariffs

Paying It Forward: Viola Zhou’s reporting on Rest of World (especially her piece on Foxconn in India) and Dong Yige 

Recommendations:

Andrew: Hetty Lui McKinnon’s Substack for vegan modern Cantonese recipes 

Kaiser: The Substack of the Carter Center’s U.S.-China Perception Monitor; and the essay “The new frontline: The US-China battle for control of global networks” on the Transnational Institute website

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This week as we enter the Year of the Snake, Sinica co-founder Jeremy Goldkorn makes a re-appearance on the show. It's been a year since his last, and much has changed — and indeed, if Jeremy is right, we may be at an inflection point in American attitudes toward China. With the "TikTok Refugees" on Xiaohongshu or "RedNote" taking in a view of China that contrasts starkly with the image presented by the U.S. Government and by many American media outlets, and with DeepSeek now having upended some ideas about American tech primacy, the "vibes" on China among young people seem to have changed for the better. Will it endure? Jeremy and I plunge into that question on this week's episode of the Sinica Podcast.

2:55 – What Jeremy has been up to lately 

4:19 – What has been driving the recent narrative/vibe shift in China discourse in the U.S., and why human rights rhetoric around Xinjiang has died down  

14:11 – Whether the narrative/vibe shift will be long-lasting and the role of young people in driving it 

23:06 – Predictions for future changes within China

29:40 – The concern that the narrative/vibe shift could go too far, or that the copium will overwhelm the positive of the shift 

33:24 – Previous narrative shifts around freedom of speech, the internet, and China, and technological innovation 

43:57 – What recent developments reveal about Chinese soft power, and Jeremy’s predictions for how everything will play out 

49:34 – Whether the narrative/vibe shift will change how American politicians talk about China, and the Chinese government has reacted to the shift so far

Paying It Forward: Savannah Billman’s Career China email newsletter 

Recommendations:

Jeremy: Paul Cooper’s Fall of Civilizations podcast series; David Kidd’s Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China; and The 404’s podcast interview with a PornHub exec (which includes discussion of real-name registration requirements) 

Kaiser: The TV miniseries American Primeval (2025) on Netflix; and Paul Triolo’s Substack 

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Happy Chinese New Year! This week, while I'm decompressing from 10 days in the Alps, my friends at the Asia Society of Switzerland have graciously offered to let me share a podcast recorded just after the U.S. presidential election in November at their annual State of Asia event. "The State of China" features three terrific guests: Wang Qing (王卿), the host of the popular Chinese podcast "The Weirdo" (不合时宜), Zichen Wang of the Center for China and Globalization, and Adam Tooze, one of the truly great public intellectuals of our time. It's all skillfully moderated by the South China Morning Post's Europe editor, Finbarr Bermingham, and it covers a lot of ground.

I'll be back next week in conversation with my dear friend Jeremy Goldkorn, and we'll be asking (and answering) the big question — Are we in the middle of a narrative shift on China?

May the Year of the Snake be prosperous and full of happiness and success for all you Sinica listeners!

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This week, I bring you the first in a series of podcasts in conjunction with the China Research Center at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). The series, titled "Studying China in the Absence of Access: Rediscovering a Lost Art," ran from September to November 2021, and featured four eminent "Pekingologists," or specialists in Chinese elite politics: Joseph Fewsmith, Thomas Fingar, Alice Miller, and Fred Teiwes. The talks were later published in a volume you can download here. The series is introduced by Andrew Mertha, George and Sadie Hyman, Professor of China Studies and director of the SAIS China Research Center, and each lecture includes a moderated discussion with Andy. After this series, I'll also be sharing with you a second series of lectures titled "Studying China from Elsewhere," which will include talks by Maria Repnikova, Mike Lampton, William Hurst, and Maggie Lewis — many of whom Sinica listeners will know from the show.

This week's talk is from FrederickTeiwes, truly a legend in the field. The American-born Australian sinologist is best known for his analysis of Chinese Communist Party elite politics. He served as a professor emeritus in Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney until his retirement in 2006. Teiwes has frequently collaborated with Warren Sun, producing seminal works such as The Tragedy of Lin Biao (1996) and China’s Road to Disaster: Mao, Central Politicians and Provincial Leaders in the Great Leap Forward, 1955-59 (1999). In this talk, he focuses on forthcoming work on the transition following Mao Zedong's death in 1976.

Great thanks to Andy and to Hasta Colman, who first suggested this collaboration when we met in Shanghai recently.

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I know I'd said last time there would be no show this week, but that was before this fascinating episode involving TikTok users signing up en masse to Xiaohongshu. Hilarity ensued, and my two guests — Ivy Yang, who runs Wavelet Strategy, an expert in cross-cultural communication, and David Fishman, Shanghai-based senior manager at Lantau Group who specializes in the Chinese energy sector and writes wonderfully about his excursions into the Chinese countryside. They've both been following this fascinating episode closely and have really smart things to say, so enjoy!

5:10 – How the migration of American Tiktokers to Xiaohongshu started 

8:51 – A brief overview of Xiaohongshu: its users, typical content, and culture, including its “we’re all in this together” vibe  

15:35 – The significance of Xiaohongshu as a Chinese app 

19:48 – The scale of the American TikTok refugees phenomenon, and official reactions in the U.S.

24:52 – How Xiaohongshu has managed and reacted to the refugee phenomenon so far, and the PR opportunity presented for the PRC

29:33 – The Chinese government’s perspective 

34:54 – Wholesome and interesting exchanges, and what American and Chinese users are finding surprising or amusing about each other’s cultures

38:50 – Why this new online encounter between Chinese and Americans is different from before 

43:23 – The danger of irrational exuberance, and other risks the Xiaohongshu migration phenomenon presents 

47:52 – The potential for a change in American thinking about China 

Paying It Forward: 

Ivy: Caiwei Chen

David: Robert Wu and Amber Zhang, especially their work on Baiguan, and Robert’s Substack China Translated, especially his essay, “The Great Divorce”

Recommendations:

Ivy: Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Dr. Anna Lembke 

David: Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China by Peter Hessler

Kaiser: Other works by Peter Hessler (River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze; Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip; and Other Rivers: A Chinese Education), and Telecaster type electric guitars, especially the Sire Larry Carlton T7

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This week on Sinica, I'm joined by Lizzi Lee, fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute and by my lights one of the most astute, well-informed people writing on China in the English-speaking world today. She has fascinating perspectives on China's preparations for the Trump administration, on China's reluctance to roll out large-scale cash stimulus, and Xi Jinping's challenges. Don't miss this one! (I will update the show notes and publish the transcript early next week — thanks for your patience!)

3:39 – Lizzi’s argument from her op-ed, “Counting the Hawks in the Trump 2.0 Administration is Pointless”: the importance of which country will be able to get its act together 

10:25 – U.S.-China competition as a long game, from China’s perspective

14:22 – How China views the current state of division in American politics

19:00 – The main risks and opportunities for China presented by Trump’s return, including opportunities in the geopolitical realm with the Europeans 

28:09 – The state of China’s domestic economy

33:28 – Counterarguments to critiques of China’s cautious deployment of stimulus, and where Lizzi stands on the issue 

43:46 – Lizzi’s thoughts on deflation in the Chinese economy 

49:30 – The idea of accepting short-term pain for long-term gain in economic recovery 

53:59 – Xi Jinping’s vision for China’s economy 

58:46 – How Xi Jinping’s ideological language can be challenging for officials and markets 

1:03:57 – How China’s political calendar has hindered execution of policy 

1:06:42 – What Lizzi thinks the Chinese leadership should prioritize now

Paying it Forward: Lizzi recommends the work of Barclay Bram, especially his series on Chinese youth at the Asia Society here.

Recommendations:

Lizzi: Grazia Ting Deng’s book Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy

Kaiser: More historical fiction by Robert Harris, including An Officer and a Spy and Munich.

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This week on Sinica, I speak with Nicole Hong and Michael Rothfeld, both investigative reporters at the New York Times, about a series of stories they've done, stretching between August and December 2024, on the Falun Gong-run performance troupe Shen Yun, and the Falun Gong-affiliated newspaper The Epoch Times. Read the latest two articles in that series here and here. There will be links to the other stories on the transcript page.

4:33 – Nicole and Michael's collection of pieces on Falun Gong 

6:26 – Background on [the?] Falun Gong: Li Hongzhi, the context out of which the movement emerged, its international spread, and the CCP’s crackdown in the '90s

12:00 – Shen Yun performances, and audience reactions 

18:46 – Following the money: Falun Gong’s dramatic financial growth, gray areas, and where the money goes 

29:03 – Spiritual project or big grift?

31:39 – What Nicole and Michael uncovered 

36:23 – Memorable individuals: Chang Chun-ko, Kate the performer, and Josh the violinist

41:10 – The dynamics within [the?] Falun Gong, and what has been alleged

45:34 – The Epoch Times, and their editorial changes 

53:02 – The appeal of Falun Gong, and the level of scrutiny it gets

Paying It Forward:

Nicole: Researchers/freelancers/translators Yi Liu and Peiyue Wu 

Michael: New York Times colleague Susan Beachy 

Recommendations:

Nicole: Connie: A Memoir by Connie Chung 

Michael: Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel; One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (and the new One Hundred Years of Solitude TV series (2024)); and the TV series Gomorrah (2014-2021)

Kaiser: TikTok accounts workplace_doodles (a former Shen Yun performer born into a Falun Gong family) and cocolarkincooks (a fantastic cooking resource)

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This week on Sinica, I welcome back Michael Cerny — formerly of the Carter Center and now a Ph.D. student at Harvard — and Rory Truex of Princeton University to discuss a new working paper they've co-authored. They undertook a large-scale survey of foreign policy professionals at U.S. think tanks to ascertain whether there is a "consensus" on China policy, as is often claimed, and whether people working in think tanks feel pressure to take on more "hawkish" positions on China policy. We also introduce a new segment called "Paying it Forward."

5:04 – What motivated Michael and Rory to write their paper together 

7:30 – Groupthink vs. consensus

10:08 – The methodology: combining surveys and interviews, and the sampling frame 

14:35 – Trying to avoid leading questions 

17:58 – Creating the “China Confrontation Index” 

20:25 – Different levels of acceptance of the labels “hawk” and “dove” 

23:33 – The issue of preference falsification 

25:43 – Mechanisms behind disparities in perceived pressure 

29:01 – Tying in Rory’s previous research on self-censorship 

32:42 – How Michael and Rory decided on interviews 

34:10 – What Michael believes were the most important and robust findings

36:09 – The distinction between the beliefs of think tankers vs. elected officials, and why people tend to believe there is a bipartisan consensus on China 

40:34 – Pressure on hawks 

42:35 – Specific policy questions

44:18 – Feedback on the paper so far, and what Michael and Rory may tweak in a subsequent draft 

49:47 – The possible role of personality in hawkishness or dovishness 

51:58 – Discussing Mike Mazarr’s concerns about the potential parallels between current Chinese discourse and the lead-up to the Iraq War 

55:06 – Advice to younger professionals entering the foreign policy/China field 

New segment: Paying It Forward:

Rory: Michael Cerny and Edi Obiakpani-Reid 

Recommendations:

Rory: Edi Obiakpani-Reid’s Sinobabble podcast about Chinese history

Michael: Jeffrey Ding’s Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition

Kaiser: Imperium by Robert Harris 

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This week on Sinica I'm delighted to be joined by Amy King, Associate Professor in the Strategic & Defence Studies Centre at The Australian National University. She shares her ideas about how perceptions of insecurity can paradoxically motivate closer economic relations between two states, and she looks at not only the examples of China and Japan after the end of World War II, but Australia and China as well. We also discuss Sino-Australian relations over the last 15 years, and much else!

2:48 – Key phases of Australia-China relations over the past 15 years and the security and economic nexus 

9:05 – Amy’s research into the Sino-Japanese relationship and how perceptions of insecurity can motivate closer economic ties, and how Australia is responding to China now 

21:22 – How Amy would argue the case for economic engagement with China to folks in Washington 

26:31 – Securitization in Australia and the important differences between Australia and the U.S. 

30:20 – The shift in the Australia-China relationship under the Albanese government 

33:12 – What the U.S. can learn from Australia 

35:14 – Why people tend to conflate Australia’s experience with America’s 

39:04 – Amy’s essay, “The Collective Logic of Chinese Hegemonic Order,” and how we can understand China’s role in the emerging post-unipolar world

42:47 – Three mechanisms employed by China to amplify its voice post-war  (amplifying, grafting, and resistance by appropriation) and how modern “middle powers” can influence the international order now 

52:31 – The state of discourse on China in Australia and what Amy believes China wants 

58:54 – Amy’s thoughts on pluralism and international order 

1:03:22 – What lessons about de-risking and navigating multi-alignment Australia should be learning from other nations in the region 

Recommendations:

Amy: Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland 

Kaiser: The Paul Reed Smith (PRS) SE Hollowbody II Piezo electric guitar

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China's rapid surge in electric vehicle manufacturing, adoption, and export has variously encouraged, delighted, impressed, frightened, and even enraged people around the world. What did China get right in facilitating the explosive development in this industry? Was is just subsidies, or were there other important policies that helped jumpstart it? How have other geographies responded? And what can they learn? Ilaria Mazzocco,  deputy director and senior fellow with the Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) joins me to share her rich insights into the Chinese EV industry.

3:49 – How Ilaria became interested in green industrial policy

5:59 – The reality of progress in EVs in China 

11:21 – The role of state subsidies and other things that tend to get missed in trying to understand EVs in China 

16:51 – How other countries are trying to adopt China’s approach 

19:21 – The differences between the EU and U.S. approaches 

24:17 – The outlook for competition in the Chinese market 

26:08 – Business models in the Chinese EV sector and the example of BYD

30:53 – Chinese firms’ push for internationalization and how the rapidity of becoming multinationals [multinational companies?] may pose challenges 

35:54 – Alignment between host countries and Chinese companies 

39:58 – What the U.S. is doing and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)

42:27 – How U.S. protectionist measures may affect third markets, and whether restrictions may backfire  

48:57 – The coming shift to next-generation batteries, and the potential for international collaboration in advancing more circular practices 

55:43 – How Ilaria’s fieldwork shifted her perspective on the EV industry 

59:38 – How we can improve industrial policy 

Recommendations:

Ilaria: My Antonia by Willa Cather; the Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel; The Army of Sleepwalkers by Wu Ming (an Italian novelist collective) about the French Revolution 

Kaiser: The Wolf Hall audiobooks read by Ben Miles; the HBO series Rome (2005-2007) 

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This week on Sinica, I chat with Jane Hayward, lecturer at King's College London, about her excellent YouTube channel, Jane Hayward China, and her efforts to bring up-to-date scholarship on modern and contemporary China to audiences through internet video, slaying various bugbears along the way.

3:28 Why Jane started her YouTube channel, her intended versus actual audiences, and navigating the current toxic media environment 

10:56 The benefits of an area studies approach, and why Jane chose a U.S. PhD program

14:46 Defining the complicated public discourse in the West 

19:35 Jane’s videos: the surprising popularity of “Xi Jinping is NOT like an Emperor;” and more controversial videos

26:28 New Qing History and different critiques of it

34:50 Jane's series on types of communism, and her video on reporting on China in British media 

42:31 What may be coming next on Jane’s channel 

Recommendations

Jane: David Priestland’s The Red Flag: A History of Communism

Kaiser: The YouTube channel Chinese Cooking Demystified, and specifically their video “63 Chinese Cuisines: the Complete Guide” 

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This week on Sinica, I chat with Michael Swaine, Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for the last couple of years, prior to which he spent nearly two decades as a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he led extensive work on Chinese defense and foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, and East Asian international relations more broadly. He was also a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, where he developed a reputation for rigorous research on Asian security and crisis management. We focus on his recent report, “Avoiding the Abyss: An Urgent Need for Sino-U.S. Crisis Management,” which offers both a framework for understanding the forces driving U.S.-China crises and a roadmap to prevent or manage these crises effectively. He drew on his many decades of experience working on the security dimension of the bilateral relationship, including his participation in many Track II dialogues and simulations of crisis scenarios over the years.

4:51 – Defining "crisis" and "crisis prevention" 

10:13 – The possibility of a crisis in the South China Sea

12:31 – Lessons from past crises  

20:08 – The problematic moralistic stances and tit-for-tat escalation produced by yǒulǐ, yǒulì, yǒu jié 有理, 有利, 有节

27:37 – U.S. concern over the credibility of its alliance commitments 

34:50 – The problem of perception 

38:16 – Examples of how each side is sometimes unable to see how its own actions are perceived by the other 

41:20 – The dangers of failing to understand and making assumptions about the China’s historical memory 

45:42 – Problems of signaling and how best to solve them 

51:17 – Mike’s suggestions for a crisis toolkit and his proposal of a civilian-led two-tier dialogue structure 

58:41 – Track II dialogues 

1:02:47 – The importance of educating leaders up and down the system on crisis management 

1:06:08 – The structural issues of the decision-making systems in China and the U.S.

Recommendations:

Michael: Art critic Brian Sewell’s The Reviews That Caused the Rumpus; Robert Suettinger’s The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer  

Kaiser: The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform by Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian 

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The British literary quarterly Granta has published a new issue dedicated to Chinese writers, featuring familiar mainstays of contemporary literature and some fresh new voices. This week on Sinica, I chatted with Thomas Meaney, editor of Granta, about what's happening in the literary scene in China today and how this fantastically interesting issue came together. Tom is wonderfully thoughtful and articulate, and we really get into some of the individual stories and the larger trends they may or may not represent.

3:17 – Tom’s familiarity with Chinese literature and China

4:40 – Why Granta dedicated this issue to Chinese literature, how the issue came together, and how Granta found its translators 

10:54 – Balancing political considerations with artistic merits in curating this issue 

17:20 – The Chinese literary obsession with losers and the role of losers in Xiao Hai’s “Adrift in the South”

25:11 – The so-called Dongbei Renaissance, and Wu Qi’s interview and why he pushes back on the idea of the Dongbei Renaissance genre 

33:02 – Granta staff favorites 

35:18 – The phenomenon of gratuitous name-dropping and borrowing stylistically from other writers 

38:05 – The issue’s three photo essays by Feng Li, Li Jie and Zhan Jungang, and Haohui Liu 

44:36 – Yu Hua’s “Tomorrow I’ll Get Past It”

50:09 – Mo Yan’s “The Leftie Sickle” 

53:10 – Yan Lianke’s “Black Pig Hair, White Pig Hair” 

57:56 – The "filmability" of some of the short stories and the connection between the film world and literary writers in China 

1:00:08 – Where you can get Granta and pick up this issue

Recommendations:

Tom: The Egalitarian Moment: Asia and Africa, 1950-1980 by Anthony Low, a comparative history of land reform 

Kaiser: The ever-expanding library of guitarless backing tracks on YouTube to play along to

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This week on Sinica in a show taped live at China Crossroads, Shanghai's premier event series, I'm joined by my good friend Cameron Johnson, who is on the governing board of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, specializes professionally in supply chains in China, and teaches at NYU Shanghai.

4:20 – What makes up a supply chain ecosystem, and why it is difficult to build out 

8:39 – A brief history of decoupling, the warning signs, and whether it matters “who shot first” 

16:43 – Personal protective equipment (PPE) manufacturing in America, the lessons we (should have) learned, and Washington’s response

25:13 – EVs and batteries: manufacturing in America, and what it looks like on the ground in China 

30:46 – The semiconductor industry 

34:24 – “China Week” in Congress, and the different responses of GOP versus Democratic congressmen 

38:36 – De-risking as globalization 2.0

42:21 – Cameron’s predictions on the effects of the [upcoming] U.S. elections 

44:10 – Inside Chinese factories 

47:44 – American shortfalls in manufacturing 

50:21 – The importance of seeing China’s competitive markets and ecosystem clusters for oneself 

53:09 – Cameron’s advice for the next U.S. administration 

Recommendations: 

Cameron: Gōngyìng liàn gōngfáng zhàn 《供应链攻防战》 (Supply Chain Offensive and Defense War) by Lin Xueping; No Trade is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers by Robert Lighthizer 

Kaiser: The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus 

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This week, in a show taped in Beijing at the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University, I speak with Professor Da Wei about a new public opinion poll on China's perception of international security and review its important findings. We also discuss Chinese views on the Russo-Ukrainian War and the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

2:11 – Da Wei’s new podcast 

4:05 – CISS’s “Public Opinion Poll: Chinese Outlook on International Security 2024”

7:46 – The poll’s findings on pessimism about global security and the global influence of the U.S. and China

11:56 – China’s growing national confidence and growing pessimism about the U.S.-China relationship 

18:26 – Paradoxical poll findings: proactive foreign policy stance vs. prioritizing domestic affairs, and involvement in global scientific cooperation vs. withdrawing in other areas of international agreement 

24:30 – Why older respondents tended to be more pessimistic about China’s international security situation 

25:58 – Understanding negative attitude toward the United States and the effectiveness of diplomacy 

30:17 – The belief that the U.S. goal is containment of China’s development and the shift in view of America from a values-based country to a power-based country 

36:12 – Chinese viewpoints on the Russo-Ukrainian war 

39:22 – Da Wei’s travels in the U.S. and the changes he has perceived 

45:04 – The U.S. agenda to dissuade China from deepening its involvement with Russia 

49:02 – How Chinese views on the upcoming U.S. election have changed since Kamala Harris’ nomination

Recommendations:

Da Wei: Chen Jian’s Zhou Enlai: A Life; for Chinese to travel to the U.S. more

Kaiser: Chen Jian and Odd Arne Westad’s The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform; for Americans to travel to China (and Beijing) 

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This week on Sinica, in a show recorded in Beijing, I speak with Liu Yang and Jiang Jiang, the authors of two excellent newsletters — The Beijing Channel and Ginger River Review, respectively — and two of the guys behind the YouTube show "Got China." They're making a great effort to bridge Chinese journalism with Anglophone reporting on China with perspectives and insights from within the Chinese state media system.

4:24 – How Jiang Jiang and Liu Yang became journalists 

11:42 – How Liu Yang and Jiang Jiang decided to launch their newsletters, and the advantages of being tǐzhì nèi 体制内

20:29 – Jiang Jiang and Liu Yang’s Got China show 

25:46 – Liu Yang’s and Jiang Jiang’s empathy for American perspectives 

29:53 – The negative American discourse on the Chinese economy and “China collapse theory” 

37:21 The recent press conferences on monetary and policies, and the response in the realty market in Beijing 

46:17 What’s next for Got China 

Recommendations:

Liu Yang: Modern Chinese Government and Politics 《当代中国政府与政治?》, a Chinese-language textbook

Jiang Jiang: The Chinese podcast Bié de diànbō 别的电波; and Shan Weijian’s Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America

Kaiser: The album The Last Will and Testament by Swedish metal band Opeth; and the Provincial Cuisine Club in Beijing, for trying food from different parts of China

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This week on Sinica, in a show recorded at Syracuse University on September 30, I chat with my old pal Bryce Whitwam about the remarkable rise of live-streaming e-commerce — and how it's already making its way to the U.S.

4:28 – Why Bryce chose to leave Shanghai and pursue a doctorate in the States

8:08 – How big livestream e-commerce has gotten and its predicted trajectory 

9:37 – E-commerce livestreaming and the pursuit of celebrity 

14:08 – The different types of livestream commerce

17:30 – Xiaohongshu 

20:45 – Why Taobao has lost its dominance 

22:07 – The value-add of an influencer’s pitch 

27:00 – The demographics of Chinese livestream e-commerce consumers 

29:09 – Insights from Bryce’s 25 interviews

36:36 – Buying food on livestream e-commerce and how agribusinesses are getting involved in the trend 

41:21 – Livestream commerce in the United States

44:34 – How livestream e-commerce has changed the retail experience in China 

46:43 – Potential future disruptions in the industry

Recommendations:

Bryce: Jeffree Star on TikTok as an American livestream commerce example and Omar Nok’s “Egypt to Japan Without Flying” TikTok stream 

Kaiser: The album True by Jon Anderson and The Band Geeks 

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This week, a show taped live at Syracuse University on September 30 with Associate Professor Dimitar Gueorguiev, author of the excellent Retrofitting Leninism: Participation Without Democracy in China. We discuss his book, his recent paper exploring hawkishness in Chinese public opinion, and his thoughts about the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

1:59 Syracuse University’s MAX 132 class ("the globalization class")

4:10 Dimitar’s background and how he became interested in China 

7:44 How the genre of authoritarian resilience took off 

14:26 China’s understanding of democracy (whole-process democracy)

17:40 Features of Leninism that have allowed the Chinese Communist Party to survive

21:21 Why China in the 1980s and '90s admired Singaporea's authoritarian PAP 

23:37 The idea of the mass line

27:16 China’s sentiment analysis through technology, and using bottom-up information as performance evaluation 

34:03 The COVID-19 pandemic and the confirmation bias of the regime-type explanation

37:37 The National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC)

40:14 Dimitar’s research on hawkishness in China: how he got the data, what drives Chinese hawkishness, and the national security vs. economic lens 

51:08 Why those who are dissatisfied with the government lean more hawkish and those who are satisfied with the government lean more dovish 

56:30 The upcoming U.S. election: how things may play out under the two different administrations, and understanding Chinese preferences 

Recommendations:

Dimitar: The TV series The Expanse (2015-2022)

Kaiser: Anthea Roberts’ Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters; and the documentary Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos (2024)

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, I chat with my dear friend David Moser, a longtime resident of Beijing, formerly an occasional co-host of Sinica and associate professor at Beijing Capital Normal University. We have a long history of exploring the underlying issues in our approach to China, and this week, we unpack some of those, focusing on the role of outsiders in Chinese society and their role in "changing China," drawing on David's response to an essay I recently published.

3:46 —David’s thoughts on Kaiser’s essay (“Priority Pluralism: Rethinking Universal Values in U.S.-China Relations”)

5:18 —How David thinks about going on state media and the reasons he does so

10:37 —How David’s engagement with state media has changed over time 

15:04 —Conscience, moral intuition, drawing lines, and whataboutism 

26:35 —The outsider urge to change China: the differences between the U.S. and Chinese governments and COVID as a test of the two systems; the role of American policy in working toward positive change and the importance of continuing engagement; and so-called Enlightenment values and priority pluralism 

50:46 —The debate over cultural differences

57:09 —China’s notion of whole-process democracy versus American democracy  

1:05:55 — “Give them time:” Anticipating when we will see big changes in China’s political culture 

Recommendations:

David: Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought; and his own article, “A Fearful Asymmetry: COVID-19 and America’s Information Deficit with China”

Kaiser: The “Open Database for China Studies Resource Guide” published by ACLS 

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This week on Sinica, I chat with Jessica Chen Weiss, until recently at Cornell University but now the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, SAIS, in Washington D.C. Jessica, to those of you familiar with her work, has been at the forefront of the fight for a less strident, diplomacy-first approach to China, balancing threats with assurances to find a modus vivendi with China. She has challenged prevailing notions about China's intentions, and has called for the U.S. to advance an affirmative vision of how it wants to live in the world with China. We focus in this conversation about a recent piece in Foreign Affairs in which she challenges both the solidity and the logic of the "bipartisan consensus" on China, and holds out hope that a next administration might approach the relationship differently.

3:45 – How Jessica has settled into D.C.; her professorial namesake; and how she has become a leading voice for a less confrontational approach to China

9:30 – Where Jessica sees diverging views on China in the Republican and Democratic Parties 

12:41 – What a more durable basis for coexistence should look like

14:46 – Credible deterrence and strategic ambiguity in the context of Taiwan 

16:03 – Acknowledgements to limits on American power and the importance of being realistic 

18:09 – Assurances on Taiwan and what threatens their credibility 

21:13 – The question of engagement and the deterrent effect of economic integration

25:30 – How the U.S. can combat legitimate national security threats from China without undermining its own values, and the importance of not treating the Chinese in diaspora as a fifth column 

31:31 – Electoral politics: the importance of welcoming and inclusive policies and creating space for debate and discernment

35:07 – The importance of testing our assumptions 

38:30 – What another Trump presidency might look like 

40:30 – How a Harris administration might differ from the Biden administration

44:13 – The U.S. and China-Russia relations

Recommendations:

Jessica: Valarie Kaur’s Sage Warrior: Wake to Oneness, Practice Pleasure, Choose Courage, Become Victory 

Kaiser: BeaGo, an AI-powered search tool (download from your app store!)

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This week I continue my conversations with some of the outstanding Schwarzman Scholars who presented at the Capstone Showcase in late June. In this episode, I speak with Nainika Sudheendra about the problem of space debris and what can be done to reduce the creation of more of it or even begin removal of debris before it makes the launching of new satellites more costly or even impossible.

2:34 Nainika’s background and interest in the Schwarzman program

5:33 Why Nainika focused on space debris 

7:23 Nainika’s prior knowledge about the Chinese space program and what she learned through the Schwarzman program

10:30 How space debris is measured, the Kessler syndrome, and the hazards that space debris poses 

14:33 The obstacles Nainika encountered in her research 

16:35 How political leaders in China and the U.S. are thinking about the space debris problem

20:02 How debris mitigation might [ought to?] be incentivized, who is working on the problem now, and the role of private insurers 

24:03 The Wolf Amendment and Chinese private sector space companies 

27:22 Technologies for mitigating and remediating debris 

31:00 Lessons from another tragedy of the commons (the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer), and how the EU could take a leading role 

34:59 The importance of data standardization and opportunities to negotiate fair use and safety precautions

38:17  How redundancy prevents public perception — the difficulty in going from “outage” to “outrage” 

40:27 What Nainika has been doing since finishing at Schwarzman 

Recommendations:

Nainika: From Streets to Stalls: The History and Evolution of Hawking and Hawker Centres in Singapore by Ryan Kueh (another Schwarzman alum) 

Kaiser: Journalist Andrew Jones on Twitter; the South Indian restaurant Viks Chaat in Berkeley, California 

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I thought Sinica listeners might be interested in listening to an audio narration of my latest essay. I hope you enjoy and that it gives you some food for thought! If you prefer to read, you can find the essay — free for everyone this week — right here.

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The Chinese game studio Game Science has a hit on its hands! The game Black Myth: Wukong, an action role-playing game (ARPG) based on the Monkey King from Journey to the West, has sold extraordinarily well in China and is breaking new ground in the U.S. market as well. This week, I speak with Rui Ma, who runs Tech Buzz China and is one of the most highly-regarded China tech commentators in the U.S., and with Robert Wynne, an industry veteran with many years in China currently serving as COO of a new game start-up that's still under wraps. They share their insights into the strengths and weaknesses of Black Myth: Wukong and the future of Chinese games.

6:44 – The scale of the phenomenon of Black Myth: Wukong 

12:01 – Rui and Rob’s thoughts about the game (so far)

17:23 – What Chinese players think of the game, and the difficulty in understanding its esoteric characters for Western players 

24:23 – The appeal of mobile games versus console games in China 

27:30 – The difficulty of attracting investment [or “How Game Science attracted investment”]

31:06 – Rob’s criticism of the game’s go-to-market strategy and its lost opportunities 

35:46 – The party-state's response so far, and the politics surrounding the game

40:57 – Feng Ji, the founding of Game Science, and his criticisms of the gaming industry 

46:01 – AAA Chinese games to look forward to

49:29 – The impressive success stats of Black Myth: Wukong

Recommendations:

Rui: Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

Rob: The Chinese TV series Escape from Trilateral Slopes (Biān shuǐ wǎngshì 边水往事) (2024)

Kaiser: Steve Stewart-Williams, The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve

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This week on Sinica, I chat with Olivia Fu, who this spring completed her year at Schwarzman College and wrote her Capstone project — a research paper that is required of all Schwarzman Scholars — on the rise and fall of the Beijing hip-hop scene. We explore some of the parallels to Beijing's rock scene, and how many of the same factors that stifled rock in Beijing ultimately led to Beijing's relative decline as a hip-hop city.

3:16 – Olivia’s background and connection to China, and what drew her to the Schwarzman Program and studying hip-hop

6:13 – Olivia’s Schwarzman mentor, Paul Pickowicz 

7:47 – How Olivia dealt with censorship in her Capstone project 

10:24 – The parallels and differences between the hip-hop and rock scenes in China

12:27 – The dakou CDs and the origins of the hip-hop scene in China 

17:03 – The influences of Japanese and Korean rap and hip-hop and Black American culture

18:30 – The importance of studying Beijing hip-hop 

23:05 – The spirit of Beijing and societal commentary in Beijing hip-hop 

27:38 – The phenomenon of Rap of China 

29:50 – The divergence of PG One and GAI, and the regulatory influence of the State Administration on Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television

35:13 – Sinifying hip-hop 

37:21 – What the burgeoning hip-hop scene in China was like in the early 2000s

40:10 – Critiques of the Beijing dialect in rap and the Beijing rap style 

45:16 – Iron Mic rap battles and Shanghai, and Chinese hip-hop’s critique of the educational system 

48:34 – Why Beijing rap declined 

59:09 – What’s next for Olivia 

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Hey folks! I took some time off to drive the kids to college and then flew to California to celebrate my brother John’s birthday. The upshot is there’s no interview this week, so in place of that, here’s my essay from this week. Hope you enjoy it. If all goes as planned, I’m back next week with regular interview for Sinica!

You can find the text of the essay at sinicapodcast.com.

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I was looking for a good episode to pull from the archive to run this week as I'll be traveling and I asked my good friend Deb Seligsohn for a recommendation. She went immediately to this one, and by God if it's not an oldie-but-goodie. This is from December 2015 and features Jeremy Goldkorn — I miss him dearly! — and Terry Townshend, an absolute institution in China's birding community.

I'll likely have to run another re-run next week, and I welcome your suggestions!

All best,

Kaiser

Recommendations and Links:

Birding Beijing

Action for Swifts

British Trust for Ornithology

Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel

Cement and Pig Consumption Reveal China's Huge Changes

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Here's a little bonus ep for you ahead of tomorrow's show, which will be a re-run of a really fun one from about 10 years ago! I'm driving the rest of this week to the Midwest to drop my kids off at their respective universities, and I've been thinking a lot about the education systems in China and the U.S. So here's my essay for this week.

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This week on Sinica, Paul Triolo rejoins the show for a deep, deep dive into China's response to American export controls on advanced semiconductors and related technologies. How much hurt has the policy put on Chinese firms — and how far along is China in finding its way toward technological autonomy? Kevin Xu, author of the fantastic "Interconnected" newsletter, joins to talk about some of the big ideas he's written about in recent months and to play co-host as we grill Paul on China's efforts to get out from under American controls.

9:10 – The downplaying of generative AI in the Third Plenum’s decision document 

18:25 – Why the Middle East is an appealing and important region for major AI players 

26:20 – Why chip wars have evolved into to cloud wars 

29:36 – How China has fared in trying to achieve its goal of indigenous advanced semiconductor manufacture

31:50 – Semiconductors: What lies within the “small yard” versus what products are unaffected under U.S. export controls

35:42 – The quality and reliability caveat to China’s goal of self-sufficiency in semiconductor manufacture 

38:35 – The success of the Biden administration’s export controls and whether the controls have really put the hurt on anyone 

46:00 – The Harmony operating system 

47:47 – The importance of packaging 

50:45 – Paul explains what he calls “China Semiconductor Industry Policy 3.0” and its predecessors

57:03 – China’s EUV lithography challenge

1:03:14 – DUV lithography and multi-patterning, and the importance of collaboration across the ecosystemin the process of making semiconductors at scale 

1:11:50 – Huawei’s progress so far and remaining major hurdles and bottlenecks 

1:18:42 – Paul and Kevin’s thoughts on whether the American strategic class will regret its approach to export controls and whether there is an off-ramp 

Recommendations:

Paul: Ed Conway’s Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization 

Kevin: Thurston Clarke’s The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America 

Kaiser: The House of the Dragon (2022- ) TV series 

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This week on Sinica, I'm joined by Eric Olander, host of the outstanding China in Africa Podcast and the indispensable China-Global South Podcast, and creator of the China-Global South Project. Eric's detailed and very current knowledge of China's relations across the developing world is on display in this whirlwind tour that takes us from the troubled waters of the South China Sea to China's diplomatic efforts in the Middle East, on to Subsaharan Africa and how Washington has struggled to create policies that can match what China offers, and to Latin America. He then zooms out and talks about what it all means in aggregate. Don't miss this show!

Don't forget to subscribe to the newsletter! Go to sinicapodcast.com to sign up! And if you want to support my work and access premium content, please be sure to become a paying subscriber.

2:39 The situation with the Philippines and the Second Thomas Shoal, and the U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty — the potential challenges in activating it on the U.S. side and President Marcos’ changing standards for invoking it 

15:50 ASEAN’s difficulty in reaching consensus, and Myanmar as another ASEAN priority  

18:53 China’s role as convener in brokering a “unity deal” for Palestine

23:02 The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) 

30:20 Why Africa is so hard to fit onto the U.S. foreign policy agenda and the lack of a forward-looking American vision for Africa 

37:56 Geraud Neema’s disappointment with Washington’s talk about battery metals and critical minerals

42:22 The pushback from Mexico’s finance minister and Mexico’s concern over the growing number of imports from China

46:48 The trade surplus number and long-term concerns for China’s exports 

49:35 Brazilian President Lula hints at willingness to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) 

51:51 How it all fits together, and how China has leveraged the Global South’s frustration over the U.S.-European-led international order 

Recommendations:

Eric: Matt Pottinger’s The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, and Anne Stevenson-Yang’s Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy

Kaiser: Will Durant’s books from The Story of Civilization, especially The Age of Faith and The Reformation, as well as the audiobook versions read by Stefan Rudnicki 

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This week, my narration of a longish essay about my recently-concluded four-week trip to Dalian and, more importantly, Beijing — my first time back in the city I called home for so long since the COVID pandemic. If you prefer to read rather than listen, you can find the essay — free for everyone this week — on the Substack. I hope you enjoy this!

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This week on Sinica, I'm in Beijing, where I spoke with my dear friend Anthony Tao, an English-language poet and a builder of community in the city where I lived for over 20 years. Anthony recently published a volume of his poetry called We Met in Beijing, and it captures the relationship that so many have with the city wherever they might come from. The episode features readings of some of his — and my — favorite poems.

3:28 Why Anthony chose poetry as a medium, and the poetry he has read [appreciated?]

9:13 A discussion of Anthony’s poem, “I Landed in Beijing,” and the feelings Beijing inspires

19:56 Anthony’s poem, “Self-censorship”

27:08 Anthony’s journalism in poetic form and processing the trauma of COVID 

31:38 Living as an “expat” and writing from an expat’s perspective: Anthony’s poem “Dancing like a Laowai 

40:46 Anthony’s bar — The Golden Weasel — and meeting interesting people in Beijing 

44:49 The themes of place and nostalgia, Anthony’s poem, “Postcard,” and the last stanza of his title poem, “We Met in Beijing”

Recommendations:

Anthony: The poetry of Stephen Dunn; the TV series Lucky Hank (2023) based on Straight Man by Richard Russo; Spittoon, an English-language literary collective in China; and his band, Poetry x Music 

Kaiser: The many international restaurants of Xiaoyun Lu in Beijing 

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I'm trying something different: totally unscripted and very, very lightly edited recordings grabbed on the go where I happen to be. For the inaugural episode, I've got Wang Zichen, the author of the amazing Pekingnology newsletter on Substack, as well as the man behind the Center for China and Globalization's newsletter "The East is Read." Hear Zichen's origin story, his approach to publishing Pekingnology, the skinny on his new Got China show with Liu Yang and Jiang Jiang, as well as his take on what we can expect from the Third Plenum.

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This week on Sinica, I chat with University of Melbourne transnational historian Pete Millwood about his outstanding book Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade U.S.-China Relations. The road to normalization is told too often with a focus only on the Nixon-Kissinger opening and official diplomatic efforts culminating in the final recognition of the PRC in January 1979, but there's much more to the story than that, and Millwood tells it deftly, drawing on extensive archival research as well as interviews with many of those directly involved.

3:33 — Transnational history 

4:44 — The early, “pioneering” trips to China in the 1950s and ‘60s and China’s shift in invitations 

11:14 — The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (NCUSCR) in the 1960s  

16:27 — The role of the Committee of Concerned Asia Scholars (CCAS)

20:43 — Why Nixon’s opening to China was seen as so surprising, and the impact of the UN’s shift in recognition from the ROC to the PRC on American thinking 

24:57 — The Glenn Cowan and Zhuang Zedong ping-pong diplomacy story 

31:21 — Edgar Snow’s meeting with Mao

33:43 — The return leg of ping-pong diplomacy and the National Committee’s “baptism by fire”

36:33 — The significance of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s tour of China with Eugene Ormandy  

42:23 — Jiang Qing and the controversy around the cancelled performing arts tour in the U.S. in 1975 

46:03 — Kissinger’s thinking in the early 1970s after the first communiqué 

48:48 — The U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association 

50:42 — How scientific cooperation smoothed the process toward normalization under the Carter administration, the state of play in ’77, and how Frank Press CSCPRC argued for greater reciprocity 

1:02:25 — The politics in China in regards to the grander bargain and the decentralization of exchanges 

1:05:43 — The disbandment of the CSCPRC and the reinvention of the NCUSCR 

1:08:58 — Pete’s suggestion for continuing academic and cultural exchange 

1:12:51 — How Pete got interested in such an American and China-centric topic 

1:18:02 — Pete’s current projects 

 Recommendations:

Pete: Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism by Wendy Cheng; Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong by Louisa Lim (also available as an audiobook read by the author) 

Kaiser: We Met in Beijing, a book of poems by Anthony Tao 

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This week on Sinica, in a show recorded on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions, historian Adam Tooze joins to chat about what the U.S. wants from China, China's vaulting green energy ambitions, and much more. Don't miss this episode: Tooze gets pretty darn spicy!

3:13 How Adam launched Chartbook in Chinese 

5:37 How Dalian and Beijing have changed since Adam’s last visit in 2019

9:01 What the West wants from China, the Thucydides Trap,

15:11 The trajectory of China’s economic development and why it’s hard for the West to reconcile with]

25:11 “Overcapacity” and the politics of renewable energy

31:00 Russo-Chinese relations and the war in Ukraine

37:12 The Global South and China since February 24th and October 7th and the importance of Africa with regards to global development 

41:39 Green energy as a driver of high-quality development in China 

47:49 The “Red New Deal” and the combination punch metaphor 

51:57 Adam’s cognitive style (an interrelated thinker averse to analogizing), climate as a touchstone topic, and China’s importance in global climate politics 

Recommendations:

Adam: The work of Lauri Myllyvirta, including his analysis on Carbon Brief

Kaiser: Rewatching The Wire TV series (2002-2008)

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This week on Sinica, Part 2 of the interview with anthropologist Stevan Harrell, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, about his magnum opus, An Ecological History of China. Be sure to listen to Part 1 first, as many important framing concepts are discussed in that episode!

1:44 “– The Four Horsemen of Ecopocalypse” and ecological disasters during the Mao period, and the story of the double-wheel, double-bladed plow

11:00 – The effect of the introduction of water systems and fertilizers on agricultural production 

21:03 – “The replumbing of China:” The South-North Water Transfer Project and the National Water Network

27:32 – Areas of progress: Air pollution and the energy mix 

32:48 – Areas lacking appreciable improvement: Soil contamination, water pollution, and flood vulnerability 

36:04 – Ecological civilization and breaking the binary between development and environmental protection

47:00 – Steve’s cognitive style: A fox of the two cultures

53:23 – nSteve’s views on authoritarian environmentalism 

58:46 – The Environmental Kuznets curve 

1:05:54 – A preview of Steve’s current book project about the Yangjuan Primary School in Liangshan 

Recommendations:

Steve: Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories; Hampton Sides’ The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook; and the 2023 film The Taste of Things, starring Juliette Binoche 

Kaiser: The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad 

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This week on Sinica, Part 1 of a two-part podcast with Stevan Harrell, Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at the University of Washington. Steve's groundbreaking book An Ecological History of Modern China represents the culmination of a professional lifetime of work in disparate fields. It synthesizes ideas from geography, earth science, biology, anthropology, sociology, political science, and more. It's a book that will make you change the way you think not just about China, but about history more broadly, and about resilience in natural and social systems. In this first part, we focus on some of the core framing concepts of the book and how Steve demarcates China in both space and time. Part 2 is next week!

5:01 How Steve thinks about ecological history and resilience theory/ecology in relation to Chinese history 

17:09 Social-ecological systems and the systems approach

24:46 The importance of etic and emic scale 

30:15 How diversity contributes to resilience 

36:18 The Malthus-Boserup Ratchet 

42:43 The importance of buffers 

51:24 The adaptive cycle 

55:41 Ecological buffers and the threats they face] in the major regions of China: China Proper, Zomia, and Chinese Central Asia 

1:06:28 Steve’s periodization of modern Chinese history from the perspective of ecological history 

Recommendations at the end of Part 2 next week!

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This week on Sinica, the highly-regarded writer Peter Hessler joins to talk about his new book, out July 9: Other Rivers: A Chinese Education. Over 20 years after teaching with the Peace Corps in Fuling (the subject of his first book, Rivertown, Pete returns to China to teach at Sichuan University in Chengdu. He writes about the two cohorts of students, with whom he has maintained extensive contacts, to offer fascinating insights into how China has changed across this momentous period with touching, deeply human stories.

3:47 – Why Pete couldn’t teach in Fuling again

6:56 – How Pete stayed in touch with his Fuling cohort 

9:46 – Pete’s SCUPI [(Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute)] cohort 

13:51 – Pete’s Fuling cohort 

19:35 – Chinese rural values: pragmatism and modesty

23:08 – The physical and psychological differences between the Fuling and Chengdu cohorts 

29:32 – “Educated acquiescence” in the Chinese education system 

35:07 – The Hessler family’s experience with Chengdu Experimental Primary School

43:04 – The impending lack of “Country feel,” and Pete’s sense of humor 

47:02 – Facing criticism over his reporting during the pandemic  

52:13 – Pete’s experience being jǔbào’ed and teaching Orwell’s Animal Farm 

59:01 – Pete’s take on the COVID origins debate

1:02:10 – Competition and authoritarianism in China, and the phenomenon of Chinese and Chinese American Trump supporters 

1:06:57 – Serena’s investigation for Chángshì and why Pete’s contract was not renewed 

1:15:28 What’s next for Pete 

Recommendations:

Pete: Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux, a forthcoming novel about George Orwell’s time in Burma as a policeman; Burmese Days by George Orwell 

Kaiser: the Meta Quest VR headset 

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This week on Sinica, a conversation that I moderated on May 30th called “Assessing the Impact of US-China Rivalry on Ukraine and Taiwan,” put on by the Ukrainian Platform for Contemporary China. The main organizer was my friend Vita Golod, who is the chair of the Ukrainian Association of Sinologists.

The panelists are:

• Dmytro Burtsev, a Junior Fellow at A. Krymskyi Institute of Oriental Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
• Da Wei, Director of the Center for International Security and Strategy and Professor at the School of Social Sciences at Tsinghua University.
• Emilian Kavalski, Professor at the Centre for International Studies and Development at Jagiellonian University in Krakow.
• I Yuan, Adjunct Research Fellow at the Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, Taiwan.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Jonathan Chatwin, author of a new book about Deng Xiaoping's "Southern Tour" of early 1992 — a pivotal event that renewed a commitment to economic reforms after they'd stalled following 1989, and seized the initiative from conservatives in the Chinese leadership. The book is called The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China's Future.

2:10 – Why Jonathan focused on the Southern Tour, and the narratives surrounding it in China

7:19 – How the events of ’89 influenced Deng’s thinking 

11:08 – How the political fates of Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang affected Deng’s planning 

14:31 – The reformers’ path to victory from the second half of ’89 to January of ’92

20:32 – Deng’s vision of opportunity in the face of communism’s apparent global retreat

24:53 – How Deng’s personal experiences shaped his policy decisions 

27:07 – The strategic signaling and risky timing of the Southern Tour 

34:07 – The influence of the Chinese horoscope, and “The Story of Spring”

37:33 – Shenzhen speed 

40:57 – What Jonathan learned about Deng Xiaoping 

45:00 – Jonathan’s recommendations for learning more about Deng Xiaoping and the post-Mao era 

46:18 – Xi Jinping, the “end” [not sure how to phrase] of Deng’s reform and opening era, and the [parallels with the?] Chinese economic situation today 

Recommendations

Jonathan: China’s Hidden Century, edited by Jessica Harrison-Hall and Julia Lovell, produced to accompany the British Museum’s exhibition by that name; and the app Voice Dream, a text-to-speech reader 

Kaiser: Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self, a book about the group of German Romantics gathered in Jena, Germany 

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser is joined by old friend Ed Lanfranco, who lived in Beijing from 1988 to 2009. An inveterate packrat, Ed managed to accumulate an incredible trove of documents, maps, photos, and ephemera from his years there and from the decades and even centuries before his arrival. Ed talks about his collection, and invites scholars interested in his material to get in touch!

2:46 – Ed’s time in China and saving ephemera 

11:47 – Ed’s favorite old Chinese brands 

14:41 – Ed’s map collection 

19:34 – The Tiananmen incident of 1976, Ed’s collection of unpublished photographs from the Panjiayuan Antique Market, and a leaflet from April 7th, 1976 

30:40 – Ed’s patriotic music record collection 

33:28 – Ed’s U.S.-China collection 

38:00 – The story behind Ed’s U.S.-China panda button from 2002 

43:18 – Ed’s Tiananmen ’89 story and collection of leaflets and files 

50:56 – The Underground City of Beijing tour 

53:50 – Ed’s SARS 2003 epidemic experience and artifacts

Recommendations:

Ed: Roger Garside’s Coming Alive: China After Mao; Lin Yutang’s works, especially My Country and My People and The Importance of Living

Kaiser: The Rochester-based progressive metal trio Haishen’s new album, Awaken the Endless Deep 

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This week on Sinica, I'm delighted to welcome — my brother! Jay Kuo is a Broadway writer & producer, and the man behind the terrific U.S. politics-focused Substack newsletter The Status Kuo. In a previous life, from 1996 to 2000, he was also really active in Beijing's gay community, just at the time when homosexuality was being decriminalized and was stepping out of the shadows. We talk about how it all took off. Jay also puts on his other hat to talk about how China figures into American politics with the election less than five months away, and about the legal standing of the TikTok divest-or-ban law.

4:54 – The gay community in Beijing in the ‘90s, and the Half-and-Half bar in Sanlitun 

16:06 – How the gay community in Beijing changed after two major rulings 

27:33 – The end of the “golden era” for the gay community in China

36:26 – Progress and its drivers and obstacles

42:28 – Jay’s “China priors”

50:41 – The issue of China in the upcoming U.S. presidential election 

 57:08 – The TikTok ban bill 

Recommendations: 

Jay: The TV series Manhunt (2024), available on Apple TV

Kaiser: The TV series The Sympathizer (2024), available on HBO; the audiobook of The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, narrated by François Chau 

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This week on Sinica, I chat with Sulmaan Wasif Khan, professor of history and international relations at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, about his book The Struggle for Taiwan: A History of America, China, and the Island Caught Between, which comes on May 14.

4:28 — The Cairo Agreement

6:59 — General George Marshall, George Kennan, and the change in the idea of American trusteeship of Taiwan?

17:08 — The debate over the offshore islands of Kinmen and Matsu

23:55 — Mao’s evolving interest in Taiwan

27:49 — The averted crisis of 1962

32:06 — Peng Ming-min and the Taiwan independence movement

37:14 — What changed in 1971?

42:51 — The legacy of Chiang Ching-kuo

45:14 — The story of Lee Teng-hui

52:37 — The change within the Kuomintang

1:00:11 — Why Taiwan has become “sacred” for China

1:10:26 — Sulmaan’s own narrative shift

1:13:26 — Chen Shui-bian and the threat of independence referendums

1:17:53 — The Sunflower Movement

1:25:21 — The causal direction of Taiwan’s importance in the U.S.-China relationship

1:28:32 — Why the status quo shifted

1:30:51 — Drawing parallels between Taiwan and Ukraine

1:33:26 — Sulmaan’s sources for his book

1:35:38 — Agency versus structure

1:39:29 — Feedback (so far) on the new book and what’s next for Sulmaan

Recommendations:

Sulmaan: Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad 

Kaiser: The “My China Priors” series (and other essays), available on the Sinica Substack; Angus Stewart’s essay, “Alien Bless You: A Review of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem” 

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This week on Sinica, veteran reporter Jane Perlez, who served as bureau chief for the New York Times in Beijing until 2019, joins to discuss her new podcast series Face-Off, which explores different facets of the U.S.-China relationship. We also talk about the state of Western journalism in China in the wake of tit-for-tat expulsions of reporters from the U.S. and China that took place during the Trump administration, and the challenges of covering China well without people on the ground in country.

5:16 – How Jane Perlez got into podcasting

7:59 – The challenge of understanding Xi Jinping

12:44 – The Face-Off podcast and appealing to a general audience

19:00 – Face-Off’s interview with Zhao Tong on the nuclear issue; the importance of quality diplomacy; and debating the efficacy of the S&ED

30:48 – The pleasure of meeting Yo-Yo Ma 

36:52 – The state of Western journalists in China, and how the situation may eventually play out 

48:44 – The difficulty of covering China from the outside 

53:52 – What’s next for Jane Perlez and the Face-Off podcast

Recommendations:

Jane: Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary Bass

Kaiser: The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History by Serhii Plokhy 

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This week on Sinica, Iza Ding, associate professor of political science at Northwestern University and author of The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China, joins to share her ideas on how American academia has framed and problematized authoritarianism, especially when it comes to China. A deep and subtle thinker, she offers thought-provoking critiques of some of the assumptions that have become nearly axiomatic in political science and other social sciences in their approach to understanding politics in China.

3:13 – Iza Ding’s concept of “authoritarian teleology”

15:31 – The concept of authoritarian resilience 

19:58 – The question of regime legitimacy 

24:09 – The question of whether authoritarianism is an ideology 

26:24 – The China model? 

30:58 – Finding a balance between generalizability and the sui generis, and striving toward cognitive empathy and “Verstehen” 

42:04 – The state of area studies and avoiding essentialism 

49:32 – Iza Ding’s advice on how to become a better writer 

Recommendations:

Iza: The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner — the story of Alison, the Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales 

Kaiser: the guitarist Kent Nishimura, especially his recordings of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears, “Sir Duke” by Stevie Wonder, “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” by The Police, and “Hey Nineteen” by Steely Dan 

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This week on Sinica, I'm delighted to welcome Dá Wēi (达巍), one of China’s foremost scholars of China’s foreign relations and especially relations with the U.S. Da Wei is the director of the Center for International Security and Strategy (CISS) at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and is a professor in the department of International Relations at the School of Social Science at Tsinghua. Before September 2017, Professor Da served as the Director of the Institute of American Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), a leading think tank in Beijing. He was at CICIR for more than two decades and directed the Institute of American Studies from 2013 to 2017.

We discuss the state of Chinese understanding of the United States: how China’s strategic class assesses the state of the relationship, what brought it to this point, and what the future might hold.

2:52 – American attitudes toward the U.S.-China relationship

5:32 – The focus of academic think tanks and strategic communities in the U.S. versus China 

11:13 – The Chinese strategic community’s understanding of American domestic politics with respect to the upcoming U.S. presidential election  

15:08 – The Chinese strategic community’s understanding of why and how the current state of relations developed, and why China changed its trajectory  

23:12 – The Chinese strategic community’s perspectives on American policy: Do they see a difference between the parties?

27:02 – Da Wei’s concept of “Sullivanism” 

33:41 – The question of mutual misunderstanding 

38:37 – The role and influence of China’s think tanks in the policymaking process

43:29 – The idea of cognitive empathy — aka strageic empathy, or intellectual empathy — and how it could aid mutual understanding and the policymaking process

52:30 – The Chinese perspective on Russia and the war in Ukraine 

57:37 – The Chinese perspective on China’s other international relations and the global context of the U.S.-China relationship 

1:04:19 The issue of Taiwan and the question of the “status quo” 

1:13:52 The importance of building people-to-people ties 

1:16:51 – Da Wei's personal anecdote about an experience that influenced his understanding the U.S.-China relationship

Recommendations:

Da Wei:  Lust for Life by Irving Stone — a biography of Vincent van Gogh; Pablo Casals’s recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suites; the films Cinema Paradiso (1988) and Forrest Gump (1994).  

Kaiser: The Sopranos (1999-2007) TV series and The Sopranos Family Cookbook: As Compiled by Artie Bucco, written by Allen Rucker with recipes by Michele Scicolone. 

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This week on Sinica, a discussion of Netflix's adaptation of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem (or more accurately, Remembrance of Earth's Past). Joining me to chat about the big-budget show is Cindy Yu, host of The Spectator’s “Chinese Whispers” podcast, one of the very best China-focused podcasts; and Christopher T. Fan, who teaches English, Asian American Studies, and East Asian Studies at U.C. Irvine and is a co-founder of Hyphen magazine. Cindy and Chris both wrote reviews of the show and a bunch of other folks answered the call and contributed their thoughts as well.

6:46 – 3 Body Problem as Chinese IP and audience reception 

14:44 – The pros and cons of a more faithful adaptation, comparisons with Tencent’s adaptation, [and the Netflix production (process) (? Or keep it separate, 20:17)]

23:44 – How the show portrays its Chinese characters and China and audience responses

38:14 – Allegorical interpretations and real-world (political?) connections 

48:11 – What to look forward to in (possible?) future seasons 

51:14 – Chenchen Zhang’s humanity/autocracy binary and the 工业党 gōngyè dǎng 

57:02 A win for Chinese soft power? 

Recommendations:

Cindy: The Overstory by Richard Powers 

Chris: Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park

Kaiser: Kaiser: Run and Hide by Pankaj Mishra; other novels by Pankaj Mishra, including Age of Anger: A History of the Present and From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia; and other novels by Richard Powers, including Galatea 2.2, Operation Wandering Soul, and The Gold Bug Variations 

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This week on Sinica: I wandered the halls at the Association for Asian Studies Conference in Seattle and talked to 14 participants and asked them all the same question: What has become clear to you about our field recently? The fantastic diversity of areas of inquiry and of perspectives was really energizing. Hope you enjoy this as much as I did!

02:25 Michael Davidson from UC San Diego on working towards climate change goals

04:22 Timothy Cheek from University of British Columbia on the importance of continuing to study China despite political tensions 

06:51 Chen Zifeng from LSE on Chinese propaganda that surrounds everyday life 

11:08 Clyde Yicheng Wang (Wang Yicheng) from Washington and Lee University on Chinese propaganda and its spread into social media 

16:57 Jeff Wasserstrom from UC Irvine on connections between events in China and the world

18:26 Ian Johnson from CFR on researching China from afar and the importance of online databases 

21:01 Daniel Leese from the University of Freiburg on the work of digitizing Chinese sources 

24:06 Tyler Harlan from Loyola Marymount University on opportunities for cooperation in the environmental field 

25:41 Abby Newman from the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies on the importance of spaces for conversation within the field

27:55 Sophie Loy-Wilson from the University of Sydney on studying violence and war in Asia with more sympathy 

33:45 Joe Dennis from the University of Wisconsin-Madison on the changes he has witnessed in Chinese studies at the university level 

36:49 Ed Pulford from the University of Manchester on China’s differing perspective on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine 

39:49 Emily Matson from Georgetown University on the importance of Marxist and Mao thought in analyzing modern Chinese history and World War II

42:14 Jan Berris from the National Committee on United States-China Relations on redirecting the U.S. government’s focus 

Recommendation: The musical, poetic, and comedic work of Elle Cordova (formerly Reina Del Cid), on TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook; and the Led Zeppelin tribute band "Presence," fronted by singer Tamar Boursalian. (Alas, the band, which is new, has no online presence. See them if you're in Seattle!)

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This week on Sinica, I speak with veteran China analysts Thomas Fingar and David M. Lampton — Mike Lampton — about a paper they published in the Winter 2024 edition of the Washington Quarterly. It's an excellent overview of how and why the bilateral relationship took such a bad turn roughly 15 years ago, citing mistakes both sides made and the reasons why China shifted around that time from one of its two basic behavioral modes — more open, tolerant, and simpatico in its foreign policy — to the other mode, which is both more internally repressive and externally assertive.

Thomas Fingar is Shorenstein APARC Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He was Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research. He served as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and as chairman of the National Intelligence Council — and he’s the author of many books, including most recently From Mandate to Blueprint: Lessons from Intelligence Reform.

Mike Lampton is Professor Emeritus and former Hyman Professor and Director of SAIS-China and China Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute. Mike was also formerly President of the National Committee on United States-China Relations.

05:04 – The problem with the use of the term "autocracy" to describe China's system

09:18 – Analysis of the motivation behind China's actions, questioning the assumption that all decisions are solely for perpetuating the Communist Party's power.

10:25 – Rethinking Xi Jinping's personal influence over China's policy decisions: the checks on his power within the Chinese political system.

15:58 – Critique of deterministic theories in political science regarding state behavior, particularly concerning China's foreign policy and domestic policy actions.

19:13 – The importance of avoiding oversimplified and deterministic explanations for Chinese behavior on the global stage.

23:43 – Discussion on the perception of China as an unstoppable juggernaut and the consequences of such a view for international relations and domestic policies in the U.S.

24:41 – Analysis of the notion that China seeks to recreate an imperial tribute system in its foreign relations and regional strategy.

28:09 – Introduction of the concept of two strategic constellations that have historically guided China's policy focus: national/regime security and economic/social development.

33:11 – Exploration of factors leading to China's shift from prioritizing economic and social development to focusing more on national and regime security.

37:38 – Examination of the internal and external dynamics contributing to China's policy shifts and the impact of globalization on societal and political tensions.

48:47 – Reflection on the post-9/11 period as a time of relatively smooth U.S.-China relations and speculation on the role of international crises in shaping bilateral dynamics.

52:59 – Discussion on the challenges and opportunities for the U.S. and China to adjust their policies and rhetoric to manage tensions and avoid further exacerbating the bilateral relationship.

Recommendations: 

Tom: The novels of Mick Herron (author of Slow Horses); the novels of Alan Furst, including Night Soldiers and The Polish Officer.

Mike: Philip Taubman, In the Nation’s Service (a biography of George Schultz); and Liz Cheney, Oath and Honor

Kaiser: The Magician, by Colm Tóibín — an unconventional novelized biography of Thomas Mann

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, a show taped in Salzburg, Austria, at the Salzburg Global Seminar with Kerry Brown of King's College, London, on the prolific author's latest book, China Incorporated: The Politics of a World Where China is Number One.

05:22 – Chinese worldview and historical perceptions

07:51 – The unease with China's rise

10:42 – Chinese exceptionalism vs. Western universalism

17:30 – Parallels between American domestic unease and perceptions of China

22:27 – Discussion on China's competing belief system

33:56 – China's raw form of capitalism

40:36 – What the West wants from China

46:10 – The internet as a reflection of Chinese power and limitations

51:17 – China's syncretism and its impact today

55:00 – The narrative of Chinese success and its PR challenges

1:05:32 – Revising Western narratives on China's development

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at sinica.substack.com. Join the community on Substack and get not only the transcript but lots of other writing and audio to boot!

Recommendations:

Kerry: Civilization and Capitalism by Fernand Braudel

Kaiser: Empire of Silver: A New Monetary History of China by Jin Xu; and re-reading Hilary Mantel's masterful Wolf Hall trilogy (Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light)

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Historian Rana Mitter joins Sinica this week in a show taped live in Salzburg, Austria at the Salzburg Global Seminar, in which he discusses efforts by Party ideologists to create a Confucian-Marxist synthesis that can serve as an enduring foundation for a modern Chinese worldview in the self-proclaimed “new era.”

01:28 – Is China a revisionist power?

02:16 – Right-sizing China's global ambitions

09:27 — How China utilizes historical narratives to support political ends

10:43 – Marxism and China's Historical Understanding

17:07 – China's "New Era" and Party history

28:38 – The Confucian-Marxist Synthesis 

56:58 – China's ability to reinvent itself

1:02:15 – What’s the next big question?

A complete transcript is available at the Sinica Substack.

Recommendations: 

Rana: Eliza Clark, Boy Parts

Kaiser: Anthony Kaldellis, Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade 

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This week on Sinica, the winners of the 2023 Schwarzman Capstone Showcase. Two individuals and one team were selected as the best research projects after review of their projects and presentation of their findings. Their work is first-rate — and if you don’t factor in the very young age of the Schwarzman Scholars in competition. You’ll meet Shawn Haq, who won for his work on U.S. and Chinese expert perspectives on Taiwan; Corbin Duncan, who looked at the impact of the One Child Policy on the economic and social circumstances of only children in China; and the duo of Kelly Wu and Manthan Shah, part of a larger team that studied decarbonization efforts in Shandong province in steel, aluminum, chemical, and cement production. All three of these research efforts yielded fascinating insights.

2:15 – Introducing the Schwarzman Capstone Showcase: topics, judges, and process

4:41 – Self-introductions from Shawn Haq, Corbin Duncan, Kelly Wu, and Manthan Shah

15:07 – Shawn Haq: U.S.-China Expert Perspectives on Cross-Straits Relations

29:09 – Corbin Duncan: Only Children and Contemporary China

48:12 – Kelly Wu and Manthan Shah: Decarbonization of Shandong Province’s Materials Sector

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This week on Sinica, a special taping of an online event I moderated on February 22, just two days shy of the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The session was titled “The Ukrainian Factor in China’s Strategy,” and it was organized by the Ukrainian Association of Sinologists, and featured that organization’s chairperson, Vita Golod; Bartosz Kowalski, senior analyst at the Center for Asian Affairs at the University of Lodz; Lü Xiaoyu of Peking University’s School of International Studies; and Klaus Larres, distinguished professor of history and international affairs, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 

Please support Sinica by becoming a subscriber at sinica.substack.com. Please note that I have discontinued Patreon, and ask all supporters to help out over on Substack. 

2:42 – Introducing the guests

6:19 – Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba’s meeting with top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi

12:19 – What do Ukraine and its allies want from China?

16:59 – What inducements might Ukraine’s Western allies offer China?

21:51 – How has China’s position changed over the course of the last two years?

29:52 – The space for expression of pro-Ukraine voices in China

32:08 – Ukrainian and Chinese popular opinion 

36:44 – Does the diplomacy of sanctimony work on a realist power?

48:00 – China’s 12-Point Position

51:48 – Does Russian economic dependency on China translate into leverage?

54:04 – The overlap between China’s 12 points and Zelenskyy’s 10 points

57:42 – How reliable is America as a partner in this election year?

1:08:53  – How will this war end? What compromises are the sides willing to make?

1:21:32 – Lü Xiaoyu’s trip to Ukraine and his meeting with President Zelenskyy

There’s a complete transcript to this episode available at sinica.substack.com.

Sorry, no recommendations this week, but here’s one from me: The new remake of James Clavell’s epic novel Shògun, which is out on Hulu and FX. It’s pretty mind-blowing!

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This week on Sinica I'm delighted to bring you a live conversation with writer Peter Hessler, recorded at Duke University's Nasher Auditorium in Durham, North Carolina on November 10, 2023. The event was sponsored by the Duke Middle East Studies Center and the Asian Pacific Studies Institute, and was titled "Modern Revolutions in Ancient Civilizations."

Peter, known for both his trilogy of books written in China — Rivertown, Oracle Bones, and Country Driving — as well as for his reporting for The New Yorker, talks about how his years in China gave him perspective when living in Cairo and writing about Egypt during the Arab Spring. His book on Egypt, The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, was made richer for me by the comparisons and contrasts with China threading throughout.

Special thanks to Griffin Orlando of the Middle East Study Center and Alex Nickley from the Asia Pacific Studies Institute, and Ralph Litzinger from Duke Anthropology.

6:27 – What Peter’s China experience brought to his writing on China — and vice-versa

9:45 – Contrasting the Chinese and Egyptian revolutions

18:37 – Revolution in thinking in Egypt and China

35:49 – Peter on his approach to the craft of reporting and writing

51:47 – Peter’s work in China as a longitudinal cohort study — and what it reveals so far

58:03 – A preview of Peter’s forthcoming book, Other Rivers

Recommendations:

Peter: Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals is one of the books

Kaiser: Kenneth W. Harl’s book Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization.

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Sinica is proud to present historian James Carter's column "This Week in China's History," one of the most popular offerings from the late great China Project. I'm delighted to be able to bring this back and to narrate it. You can expect a new column every other week, and we'll be publishing on Fridays.

This week, Jay looks at the last Qing emperor, Puyi's, abdication in February 1912, marking the end not only of the Qing Empire but of imperial Chinese history. Please enjoy!

The music on this episode is from the song "Between the Mountains and the Sea" (山海间) by my old band, Chunqiu. This song was written and performed by Yang Meng.

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Sinica is back, and on this first post-China Project show, Kaiser chats with TCP’s ex-editor-in-chief and Sinica’s co-founder and former co-host, Jeremy Goldkorn. They chat about the Beijing that was, their theories as to why things changed as they did, and share some of their favorite precepts for understanding contemporary China.

03:15 – What’s new with Sinica in the post-TCP era

04:34 – Jeremy reflects on the history of Sinica and of The China Project

20:25 – Jeremy’s characterization of how his approach to China differs from Kaiser’s

25:01 – How our China experiences shaped our perspectives

26:44 – Jeremy’s long, fraught relationship with the media biz in China

36:47 – What brought on the end of the golden years of liberalization in China?

47:45 – How China changed our politics

1:08:44 – Jeremy’s reveals (some of) his big plans

1:10:15 – Gen X China-watchers and what made them special

Recommendations: 

Jeremy: The Ghosts of Evolution by Connie Barlow

Kaiser: Ma in All Caps by Jay Kuo (the audiobook version, read by Kaiser); and the Captain Alatriste novels by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Support Sinica by subscribing to the new Substack at https://sinica.substack.com, or on Patreon — same content — at https://Patreon.com/Sinica.

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This week on Sinica, a live recording from New York on the eve of the 2023 NEXTChina Conference. Jeremy Goldkorn joins Kaiser as co-host, with guests Maria Repnikova of Georgia State University, who specializes in Chinese soft power in Africa and on Sino-Russian relations, and Eric Olander, co-founder of the China Global South Project and co-host of the excellent China Global South Podcast and China in Africa Podcast. This show is unedited to preserve the live feel!

Recommendations:

Jeremy: Empire podcast William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, about how empires rise, fall, and shape the world around us

Maria: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by Nathan Thrall

Eric: Eat Bitter, a documentary by Ningyi Sun, a filmmaker from China, and Pascale Appora Gnekindy, from the Central African Republic

Kaiser: Wellness, an ambitious novel by Nathan Hill about a Gen X couple in Wicker Park, Chicago; and the NOVA documentary Inside China's Tech Boom, of which Kaiser is correspondent, narrator, and co-producer.

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This week on Sinica, we're running an interview with Jeffrey Bader from early last year. We learned on Monday morning that Jeff had died, and we dedicate this interview to his memory.

___

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Jeff Bader, who served as senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council during the first years of the Obama presidency, until 2011. Now a senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institute, Jeff was deeply involved in U.S.-China affairs at the State Department from his first posting to Beijing back in 1981 continuously for the next 21 years, through 2002. He later served as U.S. ambassador to Namibia and was tapped to head Asian Affairs at the NSC after Obama took office. Jeff is the author of a fascinating book on Obama’s China policy, Obama and China’s Rise: An Insider’s Account of America’s Asia Strategy. In this conversation, he offers a candid critique of the Biden China policy to date.

Note that this conversation was taped in mid-February — before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, and before the Department of Justice announced the end of the “China Initiative.”

Note that this conversation was taped in mid-February — before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, and before the Department of Justice announced the end of the “China Initiative.”

3:23 – How viewing China over 40 years of rapid development has shaped the way Jeff thinks about China

8:54 – Jeff Bader’s critique of the Biden administration’s China policy

19:40 – Is it important to have a China strategy?

24:55 – Right-sizing China’s ambitions: Is Rush Doshi right?

31:17 – Defining China’s legitimate interests

38:31 – Has China already concluded that the U.S., irrespective of who is in power, seeks to thwart China’s rise?

43:16 – How can China participate in the rules-based international order?

47:52 – Is it still possible for Biden to change his tune on China?

52:57 – How much room does Biden have politically? Can he exploit to electorate’s partisan divide on China?

59:54 – What is the “low-hanging fruit” that Biden could pluck to signal a lowering of temperature?

1:12:09 – Jeff Bader’s precepts for better understanding of — and better policy toward — China

Recommendations

Jeff: Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, a book by Stephen Platt about the Taiping Civil War focusing on Hong Rengan.

Kaiser: Re-recommending two previous guests’ recommendations: Iaian McGilchrists’s The Master and his Emissary recommended by Anthea Roberts; and Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia by Jurgen Osterhammel, recommended by Dan Wang.

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This week on Sinica, a live recording from October 10 in Chicago, Kaiser asks Chang-Tai Hsieh of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, Damien Ma of the Paulson Institute’s think tank MacroPolo, and our own Lizzi Lee, host of The Signal with Lizzi Lee, to right-size the peril that the Chinese economy now faces from slow consumer demand, high youth unemployment, a troubled real estate sector, and high levels of local government debt. This event was co-sponsored by the University of Chicago’s Becker-Friedman Institute, the Paulson Institute, and The China Project. 

06:32 – What is the current state of the Chinese economy?

11:14 – The origins of China’s crisis in comparison to crises from 1990 in Japan and 2008 in the U.S.

14:25 – Real estate sector’s role in the crisis and possible solutions

22:51 – The significance of able management during times of crisis. Is this a crisis of confidence or expectations?

29:34 – The question of the general direction of the Chinese economy 

43:33 – What does an actual debt crisis look like in China?

48:00 – The right  U.S. policy towards China in light of current affairs

The complete transcript of the show is now in the main podcast page for the episode!

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This week on the Sinica Podcast: a lecture by Robert Daly, director of the Wilson Center's Kissinger Institute, delivered last year to D.C.-based Faith & Law at their Friday Forum. The lecture, titled "Is Our Foreign Policy Good? American Moral Absolutism and the China Challenge," is a powerful and thought-provoking talk. Kaiser follows up with a long conversation with Robert about the themes raised in the talk, and then some. Enjoy.

03:04 – A talk by Robert Daly from June 24th, 2022, given at Faith & Law’s Friday Forum

45:49 – What is lacking in the mainstream dialogue about American policies on China-related issues?

49:37 – Over-willingness to turn towards a military approach in the U.S.-China relationship in recent years

1:00:48 – The missionary aspect of the American approach in dealing with China

1:05:02 – The differences and commonalities between Chinese and American exceptionalism

1:17:42 – Are we in a state of Cold War with China?

1:23:54 – The question of moral standing in light of whataboutism

1:27:08 – Comparing American intentions with Chinese realities and the issue of moral absolutism

1:44:50 – What a “Just Cold War” would involve?

1:51:34 – Can the U.S. imagine a world in which it is not a hegemonic power?

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

Recommendations: 

Robert: The House of Sixty Fathers (a Newbury Award-winning book) by Meindert DeJong with illustrations by the late Maurice Sendak

Kaiser: Wolf Hall: A Novel by Hilary Mantel

Anda Union (Inner Mongolian band)

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Jason McLure, a correspondent for a new investigative reporting outfit called The Examination, and reporter Jude Chan, who writes for Initium Media. The two worked with two other reporters on a fascinating expose, funded by the Pulitzer Center, of China's tobacco monopoly, the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration (or China Tobacco), and how it has managed to be both the biggest seller of tobacco in the world — and also the effective regulator of tobacco laws in China.

06:41 – The origins and mission of The Examination 

09:24 – An overview of the tobacco industry in China 

12:17 – What is the true power China Tobacco holds in the Chinese tobacco industry?

14:34 – The history and inner workings of China Tobacco

20:30 – China Tobacco - a manufacturer or a regulator?

28:42 – The current situation of anti-smoking advocacy in China

31:47 – The role of smoking in the Chinese culture and the gender discrepancy within the custom of smoking

39:09 – How does China Tobacco manage to prevent the implementation of smoking bans in Chinese cities?

48:07 – What was the reason behind the faltering of promising initiatives regarding smoking control?

55:33 – The approach of Chinese youth towards the unequal fight with China Tobacco?

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

Recommendations:

Jude: Zhang Chunqiao: 1949 and Beyond by Zheng Zhong

Jason: Top Boy (British crime drama on Netflix)

Kaiser: The music of Florence Price, and especially Symphony No. 1 and Symphony No. 3 recorded by the Philadelphia Orchestra

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This week on Sinica, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1950 concert tour of China by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1973, Kaiser chats with Matías Tarnopolsky, the orchestra’s president and chief executive; Alison Friedman, executive and creative director of Carolina Performing Arts; and virtuoso guzheng player and composer Wu Fei about the legacy of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s China tour, their continuing connection with China, and their concert performances in Chapel Hill, performed to the day on the two closing nights of that historic tour 50 years ago.07:00 – The China connection in the overall identity of the Philadelphia Orchestra

11:32 – 缘分 [yuánfèn] and the serendipity of the commemorative concert in Chapel Hill

14:19 – What can we learn from the original Philadelphia Orchestra members?

19:49 – Has the interest in the China-U.S. culture exchange started to fall off in recent years?

25:04 – Music as the common ground in the light of worsening relations with China

28:02 – “What’s the orchestra of today?” - as the leading theme for the commemorative concert 

31:10 – The significance of Beethoven’s Symphony No.6 to the orchestra’s history in China

33:41 – The inspiration for Hello Gold Mountain and its connection to the Jewish history in China

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

Recommendations:

Matias: Soave sia il vento (the trio from Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte)

Alison: Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics (podcast)

Shanir Blumenkranz’s music

Fei: Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (avant-garde metal band)

Kaiser: Good Harvest 大丰收 (restaurant)

 Matteo Mancuso (Sicilian guitar virtuoso)

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This week on Sinica, Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran journalist Ian Johnson, now a senior China fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, joins Kaiser to discuss his new book, Sparks" China's Underground HIstorians and their Battle for the Future. Profiling both prominent and lesser-known individuals working to expose dark truths about some of the grimmest periods of the PRC's history, including the Great Leap Forward famine and the violence of the Cultural Revolution, Johnson argues that the efforts of China's "counter-historians" have managed to survive the stepped-up efforts of Xi Jinping to control the historical narrative completely.

03:27 – Is the obsessive control of historical narratives a particularly Chinese phenomenon?

07:19 – The life of Ai Xiaoming and the creation of a collective memory as one of the main themes in the book

21:46 – The story of Jiang Xue, citizen journalist

25:22 – Journalistic stubbornness of Tan Hecheng

28:39 – Cheng Hongguo and the Zhiwuzhi salon

30:26 – Common traits shared by many Chinese regime critics

37:17 – Is there a link between dissent in China and Christianity?

39:53 – Historical nihilism and sensitive topics for the Chinese Communist Party

47:08 – Are counter-historians especially noteworthy because they’re exceptional, or representative?

57:36 – The most important insight the book adds to our understanding of regime critics in China

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

Recommendations:

Ian: The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas by Gal Beckerman

Unofficial Chinese Archives 

Kaiser: Death in Venice and Other Tales by Thomas Mann, translated by Joachim Neugroschel

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser speaks with Representative Rick Larsen of the Washington 2nd District, the co-founder and continuously serving Democratic co-chair of the bipartisan U.S.-China Working Group. Last month, he published a white paper outlining his recommendations for how the U.S. can more effectively compete. That paper and its recommendations are the focus of this week's show.

02:35 – The origins of the U.S.-China Working Group

04:44 – Updated version of the white paper: new priorities and recommendations in response to the new reality

07:42 – What is the danger of bifurcating the world into blocs in Biden's administration?

11:16 – Four guiding principles behind a four-point strategy.

16:09 – Five issue areas mainly affected by the four-point strategy: national security, development, diplomacy, technology, and education.

18:38 – What should be the approach we take toward China’s Belt & Road Initiative?

29:40 – The ideas for changes in education investment in the U.S. and the role of China

34:08 – The response to the paper from the members of Congress as well as the general public 

37:53 – Is there a bigger change happening regarding the relations with China?

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

Recommendations: 

Rep. Larsen: Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe by David Maraniss

Kaiser: The Driftless Area (a topographical and cultural region in the Midwestern United States)

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Karen Hao, a reporter recently with the Wall Street Journal whose previous work with the MIT Technology Review has been featured on Sinica; and by Deborah Seligsohn, assistant professor of political science at Villanova University, who has been on the show many times just in the last three years. Both Karen and Deborah have written persuasively about the importance of renewing the U.S.-China Science and Technology Agreement, first signed in 1979 shortly after the normalization of U.S.-China relations under Jimmy Carter and renewed, for the most part, every five years without much fuss — until this year. Karen and Debbi make clear what has been accomplished under the agreement's auspices, and why GOP concerns are largely misplaced.

03:45 – The origins of the STA and the reasons for establishing it

07:34 – Criticisms against the agreement — the question of IP theft and PLA’s engagement

17:53 – What is the real reason behind such a strong opposition towards the agreement?

22:23 – How have the dynamics between China and the U.S. contribution to the STA changed over the years?

30:36 – The consequences of ending the scientific relationship with China on the example of the terminated space exploration cooperation 

35:23 – Which specific projects would be put on hold in case of lack of renewal of scientific cooperation with China?

41:23 – Other scenarios for cooperation in the area of AI in the possible absence of the STA

50:10 – Are there parts of the agreement that should be enhanced or improved?

53:50 – What’s the chance for a renewal of the agreement after the six-month extension?

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

Recommendations:

Debbi: Abortion Opponents Are Targeting a Signature G.O.P. Public-Health Initiative by Peter Slevin (in The New Yorker)

Karen: Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daren Acemoglu and Simon Johnson

Kaiser: King’s War (Chinese TV series 《楚汉传奇》Chǔhàn chuánqí on Netflix

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This week on Sinica, MIT professor Yasheng Huang joins Kaiser to talk about his brand new book The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why they Might Lead to its Decline. This ambitious and thought-provoking book is bound to stir up quite a bit of controversy. It’s a long conversation — but worth the listen!

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

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

The columns:

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

The music: snippets from

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

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

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

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

04:05 – The history of wargaming and its significance

09:09 – What is the value of wargaming?

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

17:49 – The assumptions that go into the game

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

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

26:11 – Pros and cons of the CSIS wargame

31:57 – Thoughts on the possibility of nuclear escalation

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

47:37 – Will we get a warning?

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

Recommendations:

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

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

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

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

Mentioned:

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

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

03:38 – The Chinese AI community’s reaction to the unveiling of ChatGPT by OpenAI

08:14 – What drives China’s National AI Development strategy?

14:31 – Chinese AI researchers and their perspectives on regulation

21:28 – Is there a lot of investor money going into Generative AI startups?

24:25 – U.S. policy on China’s AI development

35:53 – What will China’s Generative AI look like?

44:14– Companies involved in Chinese AI

51:31 – The changing availability of innovative AI scientists in China

55:10 – How will decoupling effect AI competition?

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

Recommendations:

Paul: The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian

A Lonesome Dove trilogy by Larry McMurtry

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Kaiser: The Righteous Gemstones on HBO

Justified: City Prime Evil on Hulu 

T

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

No transcript this week, but enjoy the show!

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Margaret (Maggie) Lewis, professor of law at Seton Hall University and veteran Taiwan observer, and Paul Heer, former national intelligence officer for East Asia in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) under the Obama administration. Both were members of the Council on Foreign Relations’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.

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

05:09 – The mechanics of producing the report

06:46 – Areas of common consensus among participants

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

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

14:22 – Taiwanese perspectives in the report

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

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

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

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

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

Recommendations:

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

Paul: Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan 

Kennan: A life between Worlds by Frank Costigliola 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommendations:

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

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

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

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

10:15 – The changes in Beijing in recent years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommendations:

Neysun: To Live, directed by Zhang Yimou

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

Mentioned: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

that it did in the Trump’ administration?

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

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

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

Recommendations:

Elsa: Translation State by Ann Leckie

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

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

Today is a public U.S. holiday so we'll get the transcript and podcast page with show notes up later in the week. Look for it on the TheChinaProject.com website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommendations:

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

Kaiser: 1776 (Musical)

Mentioned:

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

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

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

09:32 – The choice of intellectuals being translated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommendations:

David: Ties by Domenico Starnone, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

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

Mentioned:

Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri

Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen

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With the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue kicking off in Singapore on Friday, June 2, Kaiser chats with the organizer’s managing director for Asia, James Crabtree, about the history, structure, and significance of this Asian answer to the Munich Security Conference, James, who joined the Institute for International Strategic Studies in 2018, offers a great sneak-peek and a curtain raiser on the three-day event, which will bring ministers and secretaries of defense together from all over the region and beyond.

05:54 – What are the differences between the Munich Security Conference and the Shangri-La Dialogue?

10:21 – Notable past Shangri-La Dialogues

14:42 – Who are the guests of this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue?

19:53 – The programming of the Shangri-La Dialogue

26:48 – The Chinese participation in the event and the background of China-US and Sino-Japanese relations

34:16 – European delegations in recent years attending the event and the challenges they face

37:42 – The connotation of Indo-Pacific as opposed to the Asia-Pacific

41:17 – The dynamics on the axis China-India-US and a multipolar vision for Southeast Asia

52:33 – The current intentions for the bilateral relationship between the United States and China?

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

Recommendations:

James: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark; and The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life by John le Carré

Kaiser:  A Perfect Spy: A Novel by John le Carré 

Mentioned:

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

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This week on Sinica, Harvard’s eminent sinologist William Kirby joins Kaiser to talk about his book Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China, and to share his views on the state of higher education in China and the U.S，

03:12 – Wissenschaft and the German contribution to the creation of the modern research university

06:30 – The decreasing number of Chinese students willing to study in the U.S. and the defunding of American public universities

12:17 – What is the current state of higher education in China?

18:19 – Continuities between the old imperial civil service examination system and the current higher education system in China

23:08 – The state of Chinese universities before the Cultural Revolution

29:23 – How China revived higher education on the model of American universities in the early years of Reform and Opening

33:00 – Why does China maintain the gaokao examination despite its great unpopularity?

41:38 – Differences between the two leading universities in China: Peking University and Tsinghua University

44:00 – Institutional entrepreneurship at Tsinghua University

50:01 – The origins of Nanjing University and how it evolved over the years

57:21 – The importance of governance and management in the example of the University of Hong Kong

1:05:23 – What is the future of the joint programs between American and Chinese universities? 

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

Recommendations:

Bill:

Made in Hong Kong: Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization by Peter E. Hamilton

The Dean of Shandong: The Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University by Daniel A. Bell

The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be by Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner

9,000 Years of Wine: A World History by Rod Phillips

Red Mandarin Dress: An Inspector Chen Novel by Qiu Xiaolong

Kaiser: Adventures of Horatio Hornblower by Entertainment Radio

Mentioned: Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China by William C. Kirby

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser is joined by The China Project's CEO Bob Guterma, who just so happens to have served at Chief Compliance Officer (and later Managing Director for Europe and the U.S.) for the expert network Capvision. Capvision, as listeners may well be aware, was the Shanghai-based company whose offices in China were raided by Chinese law enforcement, resulting in the detention of two experts for allegedly passing on military secrets to foreign companies. Does this signal a major crackdown on consultancies? And what are the implications for foreign businesses in China? Bob shares his insights — and things are more complicated than you might think.

03:39 – Background information on Capvision

10:29 – The national security concerns in the Capvision case.

12:27 – Is there a connection between the case of Capvision with the previous cases of Bain and Mintz?

20:13 – Is there changing optics for Western companies doing business in China?

22:13 – The possible connection between the Capvision case and the Espionage Law

32:22 – The context of bigger changes in the past three years in China in light of achieving government goals.

34:34 – The inner workings of a compliance officer in expert networks

36:44 – Media outlets’ misconceptions and a lack of diligent research regarding the Capvision case 

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

Recommendations:

Bob:  Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

Kaiser: Mr. Bungle’s debut album Mr. Bungle

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This week on Sinica, Kendra Schaefer, a partner specializing in technology at China-focused consultancy Trivium, and Jeremy Daum, Senior Research Scholar in Law and Senior Fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center. discuss the new draft regulations published in April by the Cyberspace Administration of China that will, when passed, govern generative AI in China. Will it choke off innovation, or create conditions for the safe development of this world-changing technology?

04:36 – What is the difference between deep synthesis internet services and generative AI?

06:17 – Areas affected by the set of newest regulations: recommendation algorithms, deep fakes

11:15 – Major national regulations governing generative AI in China vs. in the West.

15:35 – The question of the privacy policy in China

18:25 – How far along are the tech companies when it comes to truly applying generative AI?

24:16 – Main areas of concern about ChatGPT raised in China and the US. What are the government and companies doing to deal with these issues?

28:04 – Is the idea to label AI-generated content sufficient?

38:28 – Requirements and concerns for training data for generative AI. Questions of accuracy and authenticity.

47:21 – Will the generative AI stay in the social media landscape, or spread toward the industrial sector?

50:12 – To what extent will export restrictions affect the development of generative AI in China?

A transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com

Recommendations:

Kendra: Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara

Jeremy: The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

Kaiser: The Earth Transformed: An Untold History by Peter Frankopan; Belafonte: At Carnegie Hall by Harry Belafonte; and Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall (Live) by Harry Belafonte

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Andrew Stokols, a Ph.D. researcher at MIT who has been studying the “techno-natural utopia” that the Chinese government is now building a hundred kilometers southwest of Beijing: Xiong’an. Andrew breaks down why he sees it as an urban manifestation of the fundamental ideas embodied in Xi Jinping’s ideological vision for China.

02:02 - Xiong’an New Area as a bold vision for China

07:36 - Planned stages for the development of Xiong’an. Milestones in 2035 and 2050.

12:03 - Cities as expressions of political ideas

15:32 - Different facets of the Xiong’an as the legacy of Xi Jinping

20:03 - The elements of ecological civilization intended to be built into the new city

27:41 - Technologies employed with the intention of making Xiong’an a smart city

31:56 - The idea of incentivizing the digital yuan into the city of Xiong’an

34:55 - Xiong’an as an expression of Chineseness

40:05 - How is Xiong’an discussed in the English-language press outside of China?

47:59 - Approaches to technology and nature in Western and Chinese discourses. The 

 concept of techno-naturalism.

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

Recommendations:

Andrew:  The Institutional Foundation of Economic Development by Shiping Tang

Kaiser:  Five Families by Selwyn Raab

Mentioned:

Andrew’s article on Xiong’an:  Chinas techno-natural utopia: A deep dive into Xiong’an

Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade by Anna Greenspan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

04:08 – The genesis of the Assignment China project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommendations:

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

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

Kaiser: Father's Laszlo Ladany's "Ten Commandments" on China-watching, and playing around with ChatGPT 4

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

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

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

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

15:26 – ASEAN as a template for multipolarity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommendations:

Kishore: John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

49:18 – Brian DeMare — William Hinton, Fanshen

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

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

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

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

3:35 – Motivation for Mao and Markets

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

12:35 – Variation among “Maoist” entrepreneurs

20:40 – Differentiating superficial and authentic Maoist entrepreneurship

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

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

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

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

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

Recommendations:

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

Kaiser: This calendar of lunar phases from theoriginallunarphase.com, and Mongolian salty milk tea, or sūūtei tsai

which is easy to make at home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommendations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

29:03 – Reactions from world capitals

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

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

52:44 – Overview of China-Israel relations

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

Recommendations:

Tuvia:  King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard on YouTube

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

Mentioned:

Tuvia's Discourse Power Substack

The China-Global South Podcast

Tuvia’s interview with retired PLA Colonel Zhou Bo

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

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

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

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

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

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

56:18 – Changes in local governance after COVID

1:01:27 – Who were the dàbái?

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

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

Recommendations:

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

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

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

5:31 – Motivation for and background of Influence Empire

10:15 – Ma Huateng and Martin Lau at Tencent

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

30:59 – Cutthroat company cultures

33:20 – What made Allen Zhang successful?

37:25 – The Tencent-Meituan food delivery coup

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

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

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

Recommendations:

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

Kaiser: Cunk on Earth on Netflix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

42:01 – The advantage of simplistic, Manichean messaging

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

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

Recommendations:

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

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

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

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

9:36 – Global Chinese investments in lithium mines

14:04 – Is cobalt a necessary evil?

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

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

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

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

36:06 – Lessons from Europe’s battery industry

40:42 – Electrification of two-wheeled vehicles

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

Recommendations:

Jeremy: London Review of Books

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

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

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

4:37 – Are Beijing’s actions surprising?

7:34 – The nature of China-Russia relations

15:45 – How has Beijing concretely supported Russia?

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

29:48 – European perspectives on the No Limits partnership

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

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

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

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

Recommendations:

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

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

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

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

3:48 – Remembering the late Alexandros Petersen

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

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

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

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

43:32 – Evolution of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization

49:45 – China’s characterization of terrorism

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

1:03:03 – China in Afghanistan

1:10:36 – Current status of the BRI

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

Recommendations:

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

Kaiser: Volt Rush by Henry Sanderson

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

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

2:27 –Establishing the facts about the Balloon

4:32 – Precedents for U.S. reactions to aerial surveillance

7:36 – Was the balloon’s flight path intentional?

9:34 – Why did the Pentagon go public?

13:26 – The thinking behind Blinken’s postponement

15:47 – Reactions in U.S. media

17:19 – Beijing’s perspective on the U.S. reaction

20:23 – How Gerard Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Balloon

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

Recommendations:

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

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

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

4:31 – Beijing’s shifting diplomatic messaging

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

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

24:05 – Reporting on China through social media

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

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

43:03 – The importance of history to the CCP

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

Recommendations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

18:27 – Common prosperity and the pension system

23:45 – Challenges and solutions for healthcare reform

27:41 – The logic of beginning with fiscal reform

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

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

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

Recommendations:

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

Kaiser: Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

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

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

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

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

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

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

45:45 – Efficacy of Chinese vaccines

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

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

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

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

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

Recommendations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

14:30 – Unique challenges of covering China on TikTok

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

21:52 – How different generations view China

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

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

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

Recommendations – 

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

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

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This week on Sinica, we proudly present Episode 1 of the newest season of Strangers in China: Lockdown Part 1: A day in the life.

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

Music credits:

Csus

https://soundcloud.com/csus

Moss Heim-

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

Trey

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

Jaies

https://soundcloud.com/jaiess

Bary

https://soundcloud.com/bary_is_cool

Ginger pitcher

https://soundcloud.com/gingerpitcherfredfroh

TDP-Experimental

https://soundcloud.com/user-99078702

Xxiuk

https://soundcloud.com/xxiuk

Lakey Inspired

https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired

TazLazuli

https://soundcloud.com/tazlazuli

Terri skills

https://soundcloud.com/beatz-by-terri-skillz

Lofee

https://soundcloud.com/lofeetunes

Dr3am____

https://soundcloud.com/dr3am-official

Purrple Cat

https://soundcloud.com/purrplecat

Ye Old Experimental Junk

https://soundcloud.com/ye-old-experimental-junk

Le gang

https://soundcloud.com/thisislegang

Obani

https://soundcloud.com/obani

Jozwyn

https://soundcloud.com/jozwyn

MCV

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

Works consulted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The work of Michel Foucault

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommendations:

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

Kaiser: The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson

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

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

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

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

20:26 – Refections on revolution and revolutionaries

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

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

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

45:03 – Rebecca's forthcoming novel Yellowface

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

Recommendations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

43:58 – The issue with democracy vs authoritarianism framing

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

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

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

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

Recommendations:

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

Jude: The podcast In the Dark from American Public Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommendations:

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

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

Dinny: Lombard Street by Walter Bagehot

Kaiser: The Amazon miniseries The English

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

3:40 – Patterns that lead to poor decision-making in the realm of foreign policy and warfare

8:30 – Parallels between American discourse on Iraq and China

13:54 – American exceptionalism and the missionary mindset  

15:51 – Much like the US experience after 9/11, could an equivalent “deeply felt imperative” trigger catastrophic conflict with China?

21:15 – The danger of moralistic thinking overriding rational cost-benefit analysis

27:37 – What does Washington hope to gain from the imputation of CCP illegitimacy?  

31:47 – Debunking the claim that Washington exaggerates threats for the sake of increasing the defense budget

35:49 – The role of media and Congress in the lead-up to the Iraq war

40:49 – The difference between effective policymaking and policy negligence: assessing the Bush and Biden administrations  

47:29 – Adapting the liberal “rules-based international order” to reflect contemporary realities  

52:27 – The shortcomings of a reductionist “democracy vs. authoritarianism” foreign policy

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

Recommendations:

Mike: Mr. X and the Pacific by Paul Heer; The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment by Geoffrey Kabaservice

Kaiser: Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R.F. Kuang

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We've got a special bonus episode this week on the protests over the weekend of November 26th-27th in multiple cities around China. Joining Kaiser and Jeremy are old friends David Moser and Jeremiah Jenne, co-hosts of the Barbarians at the Gate podcast, who have 50 years in Beijing between them. David Moser is a linguist, academic administrator, and accomplished jazz pianist and composer. Jeremiah Jenne is a writer and historian. Both David and Jeremiah are still in Beijing, and they offer an on-the-ground account of what happened and what it all means.

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

Recommendations – 

Jeremy: The Twitter account 李老师不是你老师 (Lǐ lǎoshī bùshì nǐ lǎoshī), with the handle @whyyoutouzhele; Cindy Yu’s Twitter account @CindyXiaodanYu

Jeremiah: Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China by Ruth Rogaski

David: The Globe and Mail article “In rare show of weakness, China's censors struggle to keep up with zero COVID protests” by James Griffith; Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language by James Griffith

Kaiser: Happiness is 4 Million Pounds, a New York Times documentary by Hao Wu

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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.

6:09 – Providing a balanced account of China’s tech ecosystem    

9:38 – German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's recent trip to Beijing

16:00 – The strategic autonomy of European foreign policy

18:41 – European countries’ fractured response to US tech restrictions on China

21:58 – EU policies towards Xinjiang 

24:31 – The impact of tech restrictions on European supply chains

27:39 – The efficacy of sanctions

30:12 – How China’s position on Russia damaged its reputation in Europe

33:48 – European reaction to Biden-Xi meeting

35:57 – How a change in the American presidency could disrupt the Transatlantic alliance system

40:55 – The formulation of Sunak’s China policy  

43:50 – Yuan’s new forthcoming book Private Revolutions  

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

Jeremy: Jewish comedian Ari Shaffir

Yuan: The Emily Wells album Regards to the End; The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin

Kaiser: mongulai.com, an e-commerce website specializing in Mongolian artisanal crafts; the Netflix show Barbarians

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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. The forum is put on annually by the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada — APF Canada — and by the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy. The Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada is a not-for-profit organization focused on Canada’s relations with Asia. Its mission is to be Canada’s catalyst for engagement with Asia and Asia’s bridge to Canada. The Institute for Peace & Diplomacy (IPD) is non-profit and non-partisan international affairs think tank operating in the United States and Canada dedicated to promoting dialogue, diplomacy, prudent realism, and military restraint. The event's moderator was Jeff Nankivell, CEO of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada or APF Canada. Jeff was the Consul General to HK before taking his post at APF Canada.

Kaiser also offers his quick take on the three-hour meeting between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden in Bali, Indonesia.

3:23 – Kaiser’s analysis of the recent Biden and Xi Meeting 

10:19 – Start of Evan Feigenbaum's speech 

13:26 – The tension between economic and security interests in the Indo-Pacific 

20:06 – The tension between coalition-building and fragmentation in the Indo-Pacific  

24:02 – The American approach to strategic competition with China in the region 

32:34 – Question 1: What role can American allies play in setting a positive agenda?

37:54 – Question 2: Do American national security issues have a tendency to get distorted by domestic political and economic considerations?

51:34 – Question 3: Given domestic political constraints, is there any chance of diminishing the bipartisan consensus against China?

54:29 – Question 4: Is there a conflict between the ‘rules-based international order’ and implementing targeted restrictions towards China?

57:17 – Question 5: How sustainable is China’s position on the Russia-Ukraine war?

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

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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.

1:59 – Contradictions of the Biden doctrine

5:18 – Reconciling Biden’s China policy and the possibility of climate cooperation

13:43 – Deemphasizing national security on the American foreign policy agenda   

20:23 – Potential for “positive competition”

21:50 – The concept of networked governance

36:04 – The dynamics of groupthink in US decision-making

43:05 – Hope for the younger generation’s prospective policy shift  

47:38 – Does race factor into our hostility towards China?

50:19 – Potential for an affirmative vision on Biden’s China policy

54:52 – How revisionist are China’s ambitions?

59:49 – American tolerance for a diminished global role

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

Recommendations:

Anne-Marie: To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara; A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara; The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson; What It Feels Like to Be a Bird by David Sibley

Kaiser: Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century by Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman 

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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 who hosts the Chinese-language show "Wall Street Today" as well as The China Project's "Live with Lizzi Lee," both on Youtube; 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!

2:40 – Findings from MacroPolo’s “fantasy PBSC” experiment   

8:18 – Did China watchers overemphasize Xi Jinping’s political constraints?  

12:31 – Support for Li Qiang across different political factions

17:23 – The changing factional composition of Chinese elite politics

20:20 – Return of the technocrats

23:27 – “Generation-skipping” in China’s recent political promotions

28:26 – The selection of Cai Qi

32:46 – Li Shulei as a successor to Wang Huning 

37:07 – The future of China’s economic leadership

39:52 – Selection of the vice premiers 

41:18 – The future of China’s diplomatic core

45:28 – The Hu Jintao episode

49:22 – Revising the “Zero-COVID” policy

51:17 – Reassessing China’s intentions vis-à-vis Taiwan 

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

Recommendations: 

Lizzi: Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao by Joseph Torigian

Damien: Slouching Towards Utopia by Brad DeLong

Kaiser: "Taiwan, the World-Class Puzzle," a Radio Open Source podcast hosted by Christopher Lydon

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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? In an unscripted episode that will bring some listeners back to the grotty apartment in Beijing where Sinica recorded in its very early days, Evan, Kaiser, and Jeremy parse the mysteries of the strange phenomenon of Guo Wengui.

03:37 – Who is Guo Wengui?

10:07 – Orville Schell’s experience with Guo Wengui

14:48 – Steve Bannon’s comparison between Guo and Trump

17:40 – The process of fact-checking this piece  

23:03 – Guo’s potential ties to the pro-Xi Jinping clique

26:02 – VOA’s interview with Guo

30:06 – Guo’s campaign against Teng Biao and other Chinese dissidents

33:57 – Guo’s role as an interlocutor on behalf of the MSS

39:00 – Steve Wynn’s efforts to extradite Guo

42:10 – Guo’s impact on the Chinese diaspora community

45:11 – Guo’s influence on US-China relations

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

Recommendations:

Jeremy: "President Trump's First Term," by Evan Osnos, a New Yorker article written in 2016 predicting what would happen to the U.S. if Donald Trump won in 2016. (Spoiler: he did. And Evan was right).

Evan: An audio tribute to legendary New Yorker editor John Bennet:  https://www.cjr.org/special_report/johnbennet.php  

Kaiser: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet, a forgivably melodramatic historical fiction novel with an emphasis on architecture

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Susan Shirk, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Pacific and Research Professor and Chair of the 21st Century China Center at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UCSD, 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.

11:35 – The thesis of Overreach and misconceptions based on the title

15:50 – The decline of collective leadership  

19:57 – Selection process of politburo members

27:48 – The advantages of China’s former collective leadership system

31:40 – How collective leadership often lead to overreach

39:40 – How personalistic, overly centralized rule can also result in overreach

43:02 – Increased paranoia, insecurity, and “permanent purge” culture under Xi

49:59 – American overreaction to China’s ambitions

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

Recommendations:

Susan – Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World by Howard French 

Kaiser – His hobby of Asian archery and finding a community/activity you’re passionate about outside your professional line of work

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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.

3:38 – Reason behind naming the podcast “the Prince”

5:53 – Differences between traditional journalism and podcasting

9:52 – The role of Sue-Lin’s mother in the podcast

13:37 – How corruption influenced Xi’s leadership style

19:29 – Identifying Xi’s greatest anxieties: party in-fighting, the collapse of the USSR

22:48 – Early signs of Xi’s ideological underpinnings most China watchers missed  

29:33 – Did the CCP’s internal crisis make Xi’s rise inevitable?

32:57 – Is Xi Jinping the most powerful man in the world?

37:12 – Reframing the engagement debate after Xi’s administration

41:51 – David Rennie’s view on China: “a giant utilitarian experiment”

46:45 – Key insights on Xi that listeners of the Prince should walk away with

52:16 – How Sue-Lin would brief an American policymaker on Xi Jinping’s main motivations

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

Recommendations:

Jeremy – A Matter of Perspective: Parsing Insider Accounts of Xi Jinping Ahead of the 20th Party Congress, an article on The China Story written by Neil Thomas 

Sue-Lin – Race to the Galaxy, a two-player board game 

Kaiser – Interview with the Vampire, a new AMC TV series

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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.

6:02 – Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel and Carrie’s coverage of the Bo Xilai scandal and Chinese elite politics in 2012

11:38 – Overview of the main characters: Bo Xilai, Gu Kuilai, Neil Heywood, and Wang Lijun 

35:18 – How the 2012 power struggle shaped Xi Jinping’s leadership style

41:42 – Carrie’s key takeaways from following the Bo Xilai case

44:33 – White Horse Village: documenting life of farmers across a decade in rural China

50:56 – Changing conditions for foreign journalists in China

56:52 – Advice to reporters starting in China

1:01:05 – Assessing media organizations’ progress on dismantling the gender pay gap

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

Recommendations: 

Jeremy: Yellowstone, a drama series about a family-owned ranch in Montana 

Carrie: Everything Everywhere All at Once; the Disney animated film Mulan

Kaiser: the UK progressive rock band Porcupine Tree's current Continuation/Closure tour — Europe dates

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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. 

2:56 – Does the Biden administration’s China policy diverge from Trump's? 

8:29 – China’s role in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization

15:09 – China’s position on the Ukraine war 

19:21 – How the Ukraine conflict factors into Beijing’s decision-making on Taiwan 

23:11 – The diminishing appeal of “one country, two systems”

29:56 – Beijing’s suspension of climate talks after the Pelosi visit

38:20 – U.S.-China coordination on alleviating global economic issues

46:37 – The possibility of diplomatic concessions to improve relations

52:29 –The decline in people-to-people exchange between China and the U.S.

1:00:27 – China’s Dynamic Zero-COVID policy

1:08:16 – The 20th Party Congress’ impact on U.S.-China relations

1:10:51 – Considering the Xinjiang issue from the American perspective

1:20:10 – The unintended consequences of wolf-warrior diplomacy

1:24:45 – Differing views on China in the Global South vs. Global North

A full transcript of this interview is available at thechinaproject.com.

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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.

1:45 – Reasons for launching the new China-Global South Podcast

13:50 – What Washington’s framing of China’s activity in the Global South gets wrong

19:24 – Explaining the lack of China expertise in Africa and the Global North

25:27 – The unresolved history of Western colonialism in Africa

28:44 – How Chinese statecraft navigates Africa’s colonial legacy

36:00 – The infantilization of African agency

45:03 – The limited development options of African stakeholders

47:33 – China’s environmental impact on the Global South

57:13 – How small states can effectively navigate great power politics

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

Recommendations:

Eric: Following Gyude Moore, Senior Policy Fellow at the Center for Global Development: @gyude_moore; Hannah Ryder; CEO of Development Reimagined: @hmryder; Ovigue Eguegu; Policy Analyst at Development Reimagined: @ovigweeguegu; and Christian-Geraud Neema; and Francophone Editor at the China-Global South Project: @christiangeraud

Cobus: The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa by Ching Kwan Lee

Kaiser: Chinese traditional bow maker AF Archery; The Way of Archery by Gao Ying, translated by Jie Tian and Justin Ma

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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.

6:05 – The story of Tahir Hamut: a Uyghur poet living under Xinjiang’s surveillance state 

12:50 – Will the Xinjiang model for surveillance be expanded to other parts of China?

 16:37 – Is China actively pushing other countries to adopt its surveillance state practices?

 23:26 – The case of Hangzhou: the benefits of the “smart city” model 

 27:17 – Is there a fundamental difference between the concept of “privacy” in China and the West?

 30:55 – How Xu Bing’s film uses surveillance footage

35:39 – What accounts for Chinese society’s changing views on privacy?

40:12 – China’s tendency to apply an “engineering” mindset to fixing social problems

47:57 – Assessing US companies’ role in enabling Chinese surveillance 

52:27 – Devising a policy that effectively bans hardware used for Xinjiang surveillance

1:01:03 – China’s new laws on digital data protection

1:05:05 – What the social credit system’s popular narrative gets wrong

 1:10:40 – An example of Chinese propaganda fabricating the surveillance system’s success 

 1:14:29 – The future of privacy protection in China and the West

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

Recommendations:

Liza: The Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy

Josh: The Backstreets: A Novel from Xinjiang by Perhat Tursun (translated by Darren Byler), a short novel about life for Uyghurs in modern China; The Wok: Recipes and Techniques: by Kenji Lopez

Kaiser: After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics and How to Fix It by Will Bunch

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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.

3:51 – Summarizing debates on Chinese governance in the current China watcher field 

8:43 – Defining the concept of institutionalization and contextualizing it to China

13:39 – Explaining Xi’s bureaucratic objectives: maintaining competence but limiting autonomy

18:57 – Remaining areas of autonomy for China’s state bureaucracy

22:11 – Key areas where Xi weakened bureaucracy

26:08 – Institutionalization prior to the Xi era 

29:00 – Main sources of resilience and threat under Xi’s new model for authoritarianism 

31:45 – Fundamental difference between Mao and Xi

34:52 – The revival of state bureaucracy and technocrats after Mao’s death

40:13 – How do we understand the tension between expertise and ideology in Xi’s governance agenda?  

46:15 – Historical roots of technocracy in the Chinese government

49:09 – The CCP’s technocratic bureaucracy as an integral source of resilience

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

Recommendations: 

Yuen Yuen: Chinese drama series Zǒuxiàng gònghé 走向共和 (Towards the Republic); and Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick

Kaiser: Children of Earth and Sky, A Brightness Long Ago, and All the Seas of the World — a historical fantasy novel trilogy by Guy Gavriel Kay 

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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.

7:17 – Moving away from the current zero-sum framing of U.S.-China competition and adopting an “affirmative vision”

12:29 – Shortcomings of the U.S. response to China’s strategy in the developing world

15:11 – How competition with China framing has adverse consequences for domestic American politics  

18:37 – Can the U.S. benefit from adopting certain aspects of the Chinese approach? 

20:49 – The steps needed to return to normalized U.S.-China diplomacy

25:00 – How can the US properly calibrate its China threat assessment? 

34:05 – The relationship between China’s domestic challenges and its foreign policy

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

Recommendations:

Jessica: Stephen Walt and Dani Rodrik’s essay on a establishing a new global order in Foreign Affairs [forthcoming]; and After Engagement: Dilemmas in U.S.-China Security Relations by Jacques deLisle and Avery Goldstein

Kaiser: The Lord of the Rings trilogy audiobooks narrated by Andy Serkis

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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."

4:40 – Tom offers a succinct summary of the chief arguments in the first edition of China: The Bubble that Never Pops

8:05 – Is China looking quite as clever as it was four months ago?

11:08 – The Chinese economy’s great COVID shutdown stress test

13:53 – China’s stimulus response

20:22 – The future of the Common Prosperity agenda

25:49 – China’s push for tech self-sufficiency

33:00 – China’s present real estate crisis

38:15 – Xi Jinping’s priorities: triage for the ailing Chinese economy

44:00 – How bad will the damage be from China’s 2022 lockdowns?

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

Recommendations:

Jeremy: The Parker series,: crime fiction by Richard Stark, pen name of Donald E. Westlake

Tom: Surveillance State by Josh Chin and Liza Lin; and Coalitions of the Weak by Victor Shih

Kaiser: The TV drama from Hulu, The Bear

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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.

4:27 – How Leroy became an astronaut

9:09 – The effects of long-term weightlessness

15:10 – Leroy’s access to the Astronaut Center of China

18:16 – The peak years of Sino-U.S. collaboration in space exploration

23:11 – The Wolf Amendment and the end of Sino-American space collaboration

26:36 – Leroy on the most impressive accomplishments of the Chinese space program

37:53 – U.S.-China competition as a driver of advances in space technologies

48:04 – Sino-Russian space cooperation?

49:12 – The weaponization of outer space

52: 58 – Recommendations

A complete transcript of this podcast is available on SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

Jeremy:  Nuremberg Diary by G.M. Gilbert.

Leroy: Old Henry, a micro-Western film

Kaiser: Putin by Philip Short; and a preview of a forthcoming paper about the Cyberspace Administration of China, CAC, written by Jamie Horsley

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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.

2:09 – The framework of great power competition and building a foreign policy that is not dictated by the actions of other great powers

16:13 – The competitive challenges from China and Russia

25:38 – America's psychological anxiety over China's rise

39:30 – Eight principles for building a new foreign policy: Principle one – renew America's competitive advantages

51:35 – Principle two: regard the power of America's domestic example, not as a supplement to external competitiveness, but as a precondition for it.

56:22 – Principle three: do not use competitive anxiety as a crutch and principle four: frame internal renewal as an explicit objective of U.S. foreign policy, not as a desired byproduct

1:01:19 – Principle five: enlisting allies and partners in affirmative undertakings

1:08:26 – Principle six: appreciate the limits to American unilateral influence

1:13:38 – Principle seven: pursue cooperative opportunities that can temper the destabilizing effects of great power competition

1:17:29 – Principle eight: rebalance toward the Asia Pacific within economic focus

1:20:12 – How Russia's invasion of Ukraine has affected the framework laid out in Ali's book

A complete transcript of this interview is available at SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

Ali: The Foreign Affairs essay "Beijing Is Still Playing the Long Game on Taiwan: Why China Isn’t Poised to Invade" by Andrew Nathan

Kaiser: The Swedish TV show Clark on Netflix

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In a week dominated by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, Kaiser welcomes John Culver, who served as national intelligence officer for East Asia from 2015 to 2017 and as a CIA analyst focusing on China for 35 years. John offers his perspective on Pelosi's trip and provides important context with a discussion of the last Taiwan Straits Crisis, in 1995-96 — a crisis touched off by Lee Teng-hui's decision to visit Cornell University, his alma mater. John also draws important parallels to the Diaoyu/Senkaku crisis of the fall of 2012, after the Japanese government nationalized the disputed islands.

2:47 – A walkthrough of the last Taiwan Strait crisis

13:45 – How China's growing capabilities could affect its decision-making in future Taiwan crises

19:52 – Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan and the political environment surrounding her decision

25:14 – Explaining China's interpretation of U.S. actions and the Chinese domestic political context

32:21 – Parallels to the 2012 Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands episode

35:22 – The potential fallout of this crisis

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

Recommendations:

John: The late Alan Romberg's exegesis of the US-China negotiating record, "Rein In at the Brink of the Precipice" and Ryan Hass's book Stronger: Adapting America’s China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence

Kaiser: Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada — and the town of Canmore as a great place to stay nearby.

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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 a 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 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.      

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

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.

5:29 How narratives on Chinese tech innovation have shifted

14:10 What made China's technological innovation possible?

20:37 State support for the maker movement and mass innovation

29:52 The technocratic and entrepreneurial mindset of the CCP

38:45 Techno-optimism in China versus the West

45:57 Shenzhen's "hacker paradise" as a transnational project

50:02 Orientalism in the West's fascination with shanzhai, or copycat, culture

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

Recommendations

Silvia: In This Moment, We Are Happy by Chen Qiufan and Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures by Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski

Kaiser:  Sarmat Archery based in Kiev, Ukraine

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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 an in-depth overview of today’s semiconductor landscape, from export control issues, to the unstable equilibrium between U.S., China, and Taiwan’s industries. He walks us through the strategic importance of semiconductors in U.S. national security considerations — and how unintended consequences of our current policies toward China might actually end up undermining U.S. national security. 

04:45 – An overview of semiconductor geopolitics and supply chains

20:33 – Why the U.S. is cutting China off from advanced semiconductor technologies

27:02 – The shift in technology export controls from Trump to Biden

32:08 – The CHIPS Act and subsidies for the semiconductor industry

37:43 – Deterrence and Taiwan’s semiconductor industry as a “silicon shield”

46:16 – Lessons learned from the chip shortage

52:30 – Why is the U.S lighting a fire to Chinese self-sufficiency efforts?

57:57 – The implications of Pelosi’s planned visit to Taiwan

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

Recommendations:

Paul: Rob Dunn, A Natural History of the Future; and Ryan Hass, Stronger: Adapting America's China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence

Kaiser: The Boys on Amazon Prime

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.

3:05 – Andy's n+1 essay on the lab leak theory and the two racial forms

6:26 – A primer on Edward Said's Orientalism and why it's a poor fit for Asia today

10:41 – The "Asiatic racial form" and the notionally "positive" Asian stereotypes

13:58 – How Orientalism and the Asiatic racial form interact today and historically

23:50 – Conspiracies on China, and what's wrong with the Asiatic form

27:51 – Japan's rise as a parallel

30:57 – How to talk about Chinese attitudes toward tech without invoking Asiatic stereotypes

37:27 – Race, culture, and global capitalism

A full transcript of this podcast is available on SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

Andy: Stay True: a memoir by the New Yorker writer Hua Hsu and donating to abortion providers in states affected by the end of Roe v. Wade:, like Abortion Care for Tennessee, abortioncaretn.org

Kaiser: The Danish political drama Borgen on Netflix

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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. Jing talks about her role as culture commentator for NBC during the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, about how the written Chinese language has helped shape China, and about the fascinating individuals who worked to bring a writing system so deeply rooted in history and tradition into the modern world.

Link to Jing and Kaiser interviewed for the Radio Opensource Podcast here.

4:59 – Jing's role as cultural commentator for NBC during the Winter Games

10:43 – The impetus for writing Kingdom of Characters

16:09 – Why the critics of the Chinese writing system called for its destruction

18:57 – What the defenders of the Chinese writing system love so much about it

25:51 – The challenge of writing about the technology of Chinese writing

29:05 – The Chinese writing system as a metaphor for China

32:46 – The next technological frontiers for Chinese

35:48 – Language and how it shapes thinking in China

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

Recommendations:

Jing: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Kaiser: The Pattern of the Chinese Past by Mark Elvin; and Closure/Continuation, a new album by the British progressive rock band Porcupine Tree.

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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.

4:59: – What did Joe Biden's latest "gaffe" on Taiwan actually signify?

10:06 – Did "strategic ambiguity" serve its intended purpose?

16:23 – The mood in Taiwan

20:51 – The impact of the Ukraine War on thinking in Beijing and in Taipei

34:12 – European countries navigating relationships with Taiwan

43:54 – The "One China Principle" versus the "One China Policy"

47:20 – Are bilateral trade agreements enough for Taiwan?

50:27 – Ethnicity, nationality, and the Taiwan issue

59:00 – Making sense of the PRC claim to Taiwan

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

Recommendations:

Simona: Orphan of Asia, a novel by Wu Zhuoliu; and the show Orange is the New Black