Sinica Podcast
432 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 months ago - ★★★★★ - 545 ratingsA weekly discussion of current affairs in China with journalists, writers, academics, policymakers, business people and anyone with something compelling to say about the country that's reshaping the world. Hosted by Kaiser Kuo.
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Episodes
Peter Hessler, live at Duke University's Nasher Museum
February 22, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 72.7 MBThis 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 re...
This Week in China's History: The Qing Abdication — February 12, 1912
February 16, 2024 15:25 - 12 minutes - 11.2 MBSinica 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 m...
Sinica comes roaring back in the Year of the Dragon: A chat with Jeremy Goldkorn
February 15, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 79.3 MBSinica 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 characte...
Live from New York: China and the Global South, with Maria Repnikova and Eric Olander
November 09, 2023 18:51 - 1 hour - 57.3 MBThis 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...
In Memoriam: Jeffrey A. Bader, from February 2022
October 26, 2023 15:44 - 1 hour - 81.1 MBThis 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 invo...
Live from Chicago: Decoding China — China’s economic miracle interrupted?
October 19, 2023 11:28 - 55 minutes - 50.9 MBThis 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...
Robert Daly of the Kissinger Institute on the morality of U.S. China policy
October 12, 2023 18:00 - 2 hours - 118 MBThis 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, 20...
China Tobacco: How China's tobacco monopoly also has ensured that China keeps smoking
October 05, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 69.4 MBThis 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 regulato...
The Philadelphia Orchestra commemorates the 50th anniversary of its groundbreaking China tour
September 28, 2023 18:00 - 54 minutes - 50 MBThis 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, pe...
Ian Johnson on "Sparks," his new book on China's underground historians
September 21, 2023 16:48 - 1 hour - 61.8 MBThis 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 argu...
U.S. Congressman Rick Larsen (D-WA) on his new U.S.-China policy white paper
September 14, 2023 15:20 - 45 minutes - 41.4 MBThis 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: ...
The case for the U.S.-China Science and Technology Agreement
September 07, 2023 16:37 - 1 hour - 61.7 MBThis 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 1...
The Rise and Fall of the EAST: MIT's Yasheng Huang on his new book
August 31, 2023 18:00 - 2 hours - 117 MBThis 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. See Privacy Policy at https://art1...
China Stories summer special: The best of This Week in China's HIstory
August 24, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 62.1 MBSomething 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...
Wargaming a Taiwan invasion scenario: Lyle Goldstein on the CSIS wargame “The First Battle of the Next War"
August 17, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 62.3 MBThis 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 whos...
The state of play of generative AI in China, with Paul Triolo
August 10, 2023 17:54 - 1 hour - 60.3 MBThis 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...
Is the Biden administration resetting U.S.-China relations?
August 03, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 76.3 MBThis 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...
The CFR Taiwan task force report: advice and dissent, with Maggie Lewis and Paul Heer
July 27, 2023 18:00 - 56 minutes - 51.8 MBThis 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 C...
Transnational repression and China's "overseas police stations," with Jeremy Daum of Yale's Paul Tsai China Law Center
July 20, 2023 18:00 - 45 minutes - 41.3 MBThis 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 dispari...
China after COVID: UPenn's Neysun Mahboubi reports on scholarly exchange in a tightening political space
July 13, 2023 18:00 - 49 minutes - 45.6 MBThis 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 i...
China's Military-Civil Fusion program: CNAS fellow Elsa Kania on the myths and realities
July 06, 2023 18:00 - 52 minutes - 47.9 MBThis 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 sta...
Mr. Blinken goes to Beijing, with former NSC China Director Dennis Wilder
June 19, 2023 21:11 - 52 minutes - 48.3 MBWith 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 ...
Economist Keyu Jin on her new book, "The New China Playbook"
June 15, 2023 19:11 - 1 hour - 77.5 MBThis 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 th...
David Ownby of ReadingtheChinaDream.com on the intellectual mood in China
June 08, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 68.5 MBThis 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...
Curtain-raiser on the Shangri-La Dialogue, with the man who runs the show: James Crabtree of IISS
June 01, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 65.2 MBWith 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...
Harvard's William Kirby on China's higher education system and his book "Empires of Ideas"
May 25, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 76.7 MBThis 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 universit...
Does the Capvision raid signal a crackdown on consultancies in China? The China Project's CEO Bob Guterma, formerly of Capvision, weighs in
May 18, 2023 18:00 - 47 minutes - 43.2 MBThis 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. Doe...
China's draft regulations on generative AI, with Kendra Schaefer and Jeremy Daum
May 11, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 59.6 MBThis 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...
Xiong'an: Techno-natural utopia or authoritarian folly?
May 04, 2023 18:00 - 57 minutes - 52.7 MBThis 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. Mileston...
Earth Day episode: How can the U.S. and China cooperate on climate in this era of competition?
April 27, 2023 18:00 - 56 minutes - 51.5 MBThis 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 ...
Legendary CNN reporter Mike Chinoy on his book and documentary series "Assignment China"
April 20, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 66.9 MBThis 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:...
As the U.S. and China part ways, the Global South finds its own path, with Kishore Mahbubani
April 13, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 55.1 MBThis 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...
Sinica at the Association for Asian Studies Conference, Boston 2023: Capsule interviews
April 06, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 58.3 MBThis 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 Guob...
The Maoist legacy in Chinese private enterprise, with Chris Marquis
March 30, 2023 18:00 - 58 minutes - 53.5 MBThis 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 priv...
Beijing brokers a Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, with Tuvia Gering
March 23, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 62.7 MBThis 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...
The Xi-Putin meetings, with Maria Repnikova
March 23, 2023 18:00 - 28 minutes - 26.2 MBThis 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...
The expansion of China's administrative state during COVID, with Yale Law's Taisu Zhang
March 16, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 73.6 MBThis 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 t...
Inside Tencent's "Influence Empire," with Bloomberg's Lulu Chen
March 09, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 59.6 MBThis 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 Mar...
Jude Blanchette on the Select Committee and the American moral panic over China
March 09, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 55.6 MBA 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 fr...
China and the electric vehicle battery supply chain, with Henry Sanderson
March 02, 2023 19:00 - 47 minutes - 43.6 MBThis 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, cobal...
China and the Ukraine War one year after the invasion, with Evan Feigenbaum and Alexander Gabuev
February 23, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 55.2 MBIt'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, join...
Sinostan: Raffaello Pantucci on China's inadvertent empire in Central Asia
February 16, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 70.9 MBThis 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 effor...
CSIS analyst Gerard DiPippo deflates the balloon hype and brings the discussion back to earth
February 06, 2023 16:58 - 30 minutes - 28.3 MBThis 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 –Est...
Live in New York City with veteran China journalist Ian Johnson
February 02, 2023 19:00 - 56 minutes - 51.7 MBThis 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 1...
Is China's demography China's destiny? A chat with former World Bank economist Bert Hofman
January 25, 2023 20:11 - 50 minutes - 46.5 MBWhen 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 ...
A firsthand view of China's chaotic COVID re-opening, with Deborah Seligsohn
January 19, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 72.9 MBThis 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...
Talking China on TikTok with The China Project's Susan St. Denis
January 12, 2023 19:00 - 44 minutes - 41.1 MBThis 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...
The Sinica Network presents Strangers in China S3 Episode 1
January 06, 2023 17:22 - 1 hour - 89.2 MBThis 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 d...
No Stranger to China: A conversation with Strangers in China creator Clay Baldo about Season 3
January 05, 2023 17:59 - 56 minutes - 52.2 MBWe 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 Sha...
Author Rebecca Kuang on her novel Babel, or on the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators Revolution
December 29, 2022 19:19 - 52 minutes - 47.9 MBThis 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 los...