In the latest in our series on belief, we’re looking at China’s official belief system—Marxism. In recent years, netizens have argued China has entered the ‘garbage time’ of history, a phrase borrowed from the dying minutes of a basketball game, which now references a crisis of trust in the Communist Party and its official ideology. To ask whether Marxism still exists in China, and how Marx influences the Chinese state, we’re joined by two guests: Alison Sile Chen Zhao, a University of Californi...
Jun 26, 2025•42 min
In our third episode on beliefs and ideologies, we explore China’s newfound enthusiasm for psychiatry. Counselling was only registered as a profession in 2001 yet has seen a massive boom under Xi Jinping. The psy-boom is such that even party branch meetings are doing mindfulness exercises, and practitioners are trying to indigenise counselling practices. There’s plenty to work on; the 2022 China Mental Health Survey found seven percent of the population were suffering from depression, half of th...
Apr 01, 2025•48 min
To welcome the Year of the Snake, we’re launching a new series looking at belief in China. Young Chinese people are increasingly turning to spirituality - even online manifestations of it - and feng shui, in this moment of high unemployment and economic stress. For a Party guided by materialism, this spike in spiritual interest presents a dilemma: how to regulate something you purport not to believe in. To discuss the state's use of spirituality from the Qing to now, we’re joined by Tristan Brow...
Feb 05, 2025•47 min
China is in the grip of a gender war. While government officials are texting and even cold calling women to urge them have children, the fertility rate continues to drop. Better educated and often better paid their male peers, many urban Chinese women are simply choosing not to marry. To discuss the growing female backlash to the Party’s pro-natal policies, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Chloe Mofei Shen, lifestyle director of Elle China and Qiqi Huang, post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of ...
Jan 13, 2025•44 min
Few outside the Chinese wedding banquet circuit have heard of fish maw, a flavourless, unappetising-looking swim bladder found in bony fish. In dried form, a kilo from the right species goes for around $150,000 on the world market, double the price of a kilogram of cocaine. The most prized maw is found in one of the remotest corners of the planet, the Kikori Delta in southern Papua New Guinea, where the once ignored scaly croaker is being targeted on an industrial scale by Chinese fishing compan...
Dec 10, 2024•43 min
Writers from Hong Kong face a Kafkaesque decision in the years since draconian security legislation was imposed on the city: to stay and be subject to intense censorship, or to write freely from exile. In this episode, Louisa speaks to two award-winning authors who have chosen different paths. Lau Yeewa is still living in Hong Kong; her book Tongueless , translated by Jennifer Feeley, won the 2024 Pen Translates award. Gigi Leung Lee-chi is now based in Taiwan, and her book The Melancholy of Tre...
Nov 08, 2024•41 min
In our third episode on pig butchering scams, we explore the origins of the Chinese criminal syndicates that enslave people from at least 66 different countries. We examine the institutions supporting this appalling business, from the Thai military to cryptocurrencies, Burmese border guard forces to special economic zones. And the marks for these scam syndicates are not just Chinese lonely hearts—Western countries are now more profitable to scam than China. To ask what can be done to counter thi...
Oct 02, 2024•48 min
Taiwan is ground zero for cognitive warfare, with the island subject to more disinformation than any other democracy. The targets are political candidates, media outlets, even boy bands. The threat is so serious that Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice recently set up a Cognitive Warfare Research Center. To explore this war for Taiwanese minds, Louisa and Graeme are joined by independent writer Min Chao and journalist Brian Hioe from New Bloom Magazine. Image: Taiwan News Formosa TV, YouTube, 20 Januar...
Aug 31, 2024•44 min
After our last episode on an online romance scam operating out of Palau we were contacted by Neo Lu, who was trafficked to work in an online scam camp on the Myanmar-Thailand border, the victim of a $US3 trillion global criminal industry. He joins Louisa and Graeme to offer jaw-dropping detail on life inside a scam centre, the mechanics of pig butchering, who benefits from this new form of slavery and how they launder their profits. Image: c/- Yihao Lu, Scamming equipment, Dongmei Camp, 2022 Epi...
Jul 24, 2024•49 min
Chinese triads have been making a Pacific play, notably in the tiny nation of Palau. There a notorious triad boss - nicknamed Broken Tooth - reinvented himself as a CCP-linked businessman trying to set up a 'gangster-themed' casino, while police busted a Chinese 'fraud factory'. In Palau, this scam scheme was linked to businessmen touting United Front credentials, who are also involved in local politics and media outlets. To examine the ties between Chinese gangsters and the Communist Party, Lou...
Jun 12, 2024•47 min
For our hundredth episode, there was only one choice in the Year of the Dragon. We tackle the scaly mythical beast, which now finds itself central to the Party’s image. We look at the political efficacy of the dragon for the CCP, which has recently launched a nationalistic rebranding campaign for the ‘loong’ to distinguish it from evil Western dragons. We explore the history of the dragon, its often-fraught relationship to power, and (once common) “official sightings” of dragons in government ga...
May 13, 2024•40 min
China’s largesse in the Pacific is nothing if not visible. From mobile phone towers to gleaming stadiums and government buildings, Beijing’s splashing out on those it sees as choosing “the right side of history.” In this episode, we explore Taiwan’s future in the Pacific as it is deserted by its former diplomatic allies, lured by Beijing’s goodies. In this episode, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Solomon Islands journalist Dorothy Wickham, co-founder of the Melanesian News Network, and the Unive...
Mar 27, 2024•37 min
Stand-up comedy looked set to be the next big thing on China’s entertainment scene, with shows like Roast Convention drawing billions of views and comics scoring lucrative commercial endorsements. But comedy now finds itself in retreat. A new wave of feminist comics is struggling with attacks from online trolls and a disapproving state. To ask whether the regime–and China’s men—can take a joke, Louisa and Graeme are joined by three stand up Chinese comedians: He Huang who's based here in Austral...
Feb 08, 2024•46 min
Every generation in modern China has been richer and more ambitious than the one before—until Gen Z. With youth unemployment so high that the government has simply stopped reporting the figures, many are opting to lie flat, slump down dead, or even become full-time children. The Party frets that despite the best efforts of the propaganda organs to get them excited about a tech-driven utopian future, China’s young people seem to have lost their work ethic. Louisa and Graeme are joined by Steven S...
Dec 13, 2023•41 min
The exponential trauma produced by the Cultural Revolution is barely mentioned in China, yet has been foundational to a generation. Now the Communist Party is using the experience of its leader Xi Jinping as one of the 17 million young people sent down to the countryside to reframe the movement as showcasing personal sacrifice in the interests of national success. The party would like other aspects to be forgotten, such as the unimaginable violence in Chongqing or the petty brutality that set ch...
Nov 08, 2023•50 min
Writing history in China has never been easy; China’s first historian, Sima Qian, was forced to choose between execution and castration and imprisonment. He chose the latter in order to finish his life’s work, Records of the Grand Historian . Now China’s keepers of inconvenient truths are put under immense pressure by Xi Jinping’s war on historical nihilism—viewpoints and memories that run counter to official Party history. Fighting a seemingly unwinnable battle against the state, China’s underg...
Sep 27, 2023•48 min
Just as satirical writers struggled in Trump's America, China's sci-fi writers are facing a challenge: how do you write in a world where reality is more like science fiction than science fiction itself? Added to that are the perils of popularity, with everyone from Netflix to the Communist Party embracing Chinese science fiction. To explore China's metaverse of sci-fi, Loiusa and Graeme are joined by Emily Jin, a science fiction and fantasy translator who’s also a PhD candidate at Yale and trans...
Aug 29, 2023•53 min
Beijing's recent ban on the export of two rare metals represents the latest front in the global battle to control chipmaking technology. Now there are fears China could block the export of rare earths, over which it has a stranglehold. How close are we to that nuclear option? To find out, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Martijn Rasser, a former senior intelligence officer and analyst with the CIA, who is now the managing director of the Netherlands-based Datenna, and Jon Hykaway, the director an...
Aug 07, 2023•48 min
New Zealand is in Beijing's good books, attracting state media praise as setting 'a good example' for other countries in its ties, as Prime Minister Chris Hipkins jets into China. He's said his message is crystal clear: New Zealand is open for business. But critics say the country's policy is muddled and ambiguous, despite Chinese encroachment. Two ethnic Chinese MPs have been expelled over their links to Beijing, and a prominent New Zealand China academic was targeted with office break-ins. To ...
Jun 27, 2023•40 min
In the final episode exploring China's Strategic New Frontiers, we are investigating China's growing cyberpower ambitions. On the National Cyber Power index, Beijing is already the world's number two cyberpower, behind only the US. Its cyberdoctrine includes promoting cybersovereignty, constructing internet standards and infrastructure, and playing a bigger role in cyber governance bodies. To ask what this means for the future of the Internet, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Konstantinos Komaiti...
Jun 14, 2023•44 min
China appears to have restarted construction on its fifth Antarctic station for the first time since 2018. It’s just one sign that Beijing is trying to increase its footprint in the world’s coldest regions. It already calls itself a near-Arctic state and is planning for an ice-free shipping route across the top of the world. This month, to discuss the drivers behind China’s polar ambitions, Graeme and Louisa are joined by Eyck Freyman of the Arctic Initiative at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Gover...
May 04, 2023•43 min
China's reaching not just for the stars, but also for the deepest ocean depths. It's even parked its deepwater submersible in the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the world's oceans, and planted flags on the ocean bed. This month, Graeme and Louisa are joined by China Ocean Institute CEO Tabitha Mallory and Tiffany Ma, the senior director of Bower Group Asia, to talk about how the Great Game is playing out on our seabeds. Image: Caulophryne pelagica [Angler Fish] D. Shale, CC BY 2.0 <http...
Mar 29, 2023•43 min
In a new series of episodes, we’re examining how China is pushing the boundaries of science and territory. First up, China’s space program, the envy of space scientists worldwide for seemingly bottomless pots of funding from government, and increasingly, venture capital. China's space programme, with a space telescope that is constantly being upgraded and its uber-for-satellites, is no longer just cloning Soviet tech. To explore the ecology of China’s space sector and ask what’s driving their ma...
Feb 28, 2023•45 min
In a few short months, Chinese officials have gone from COVID cover-up to competing over who has the highest number of infections. After urbanites flocked back to the countryside for lunar New Year, the Party that ran the world’s strictest prevention regime now presides over the world’s largest and most ambitious experiment in herd immunity. To explore how this dramatic change unfolded, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Rela...
Feb 06, 2023•48 min
Finally, China’s sloughing off the Zero Covid policy it’s embraced for three years. This followed a spasm of discontent, with people taking to the streets to demonstrate against Zero Covid, in protests that quickly spilled over to demand democracy and Xi Jinping's resignation. Beijing’s adaptive authoritarianism is in full sight, as the state eases Covid controls and reverses three years of rhetoric on the dangers of the virus. To ask whether the protests were a flash in the pan, we’re joined by...
Dec 15, 2022•49 min
“Controlling data means controlling the future.” Those are not George Orwell's words, but instead were uttered in 2015 by Jack Ma, founder of tech company Alibaba. Though Ma has since been brought to heel by the Chinese state, the CCP is constantly expanding the way it harnesses data to bolster its techno-authoritarian rule. Chinese companies now lead the world in AI and facial recognition technology, though they are helped by surprising allies in corporate America. To find out how Xi Jinping’s ...
Nov 28, 2022•49 min
China's political event of the decade - its 20th Party Congress - will confirm Xi Jinping's third term as leader of the CCP and could even bestow on him the title of ‘chairman’. With an economy crippled by zero-COVID and global public opinion about China turning precipitously negative, it seems an age since China’s leaders promised a ‘peaceful rise’. Was this peaceful rise stymied by hardliners, or was it all an elaborate influence operation orchestrated by China's spies? For two very different ...
Oct 14, 2022•55 min
The Southeast Asian nation has historically been seen as China's first client state, with the Khmer Rouge's hardline interpretation of Maoism leading to the horror of the Killing Fields. Four decades on, Cambodia still enjoys the best and the worst of what the People’s Republic can offer. While aid from Beijing has built world-class infrastructure and provided clean drinking water to Cambodians, Chinese companies are also responsible for a tidal wave of scams, illegal casinos and even recent cas...
Sep 19, 2022•44 min
Chinese households under lockdown have lacked food, company, and access to medical care. But they’ve had an almost endless supply of a traditional Chinese medicine treatment called Lianhua Qingwen , made by Yiling Pharmaceuticals. Chinese students abroad even have this drug delivered to their doorsteps in healthcare packages, and demand for it among diaspora communities has seen panic-buying and hugely inflated prices. In this episode, we explore why the Chinese state has invested huge sums in p...
Aug 02, 2022•44 min
It’s now been twenty-five years since Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty with a pledge not to change Hong Kong’s way of life for fifty years. In actual fact, Beijing's stealth infiltration of Hong Kong began long before the territory's return, with United Front work targeting certain sectors of the population. In this episode, we delve deep into Hong Kong's history to pinpoint how Beijing used the cheongsam makers and policemen - among others - to infiltrate society. Graeme is joined by H...
Jun 30, 2022•47 min
