The Argentinian football star Lionel Messi has been trending on Weibo – and unfortunately, not for a good reason. It all started when Messi sat out a match in Hong Kong earlier this month. His reason – that he was injured – wasn’t good enough for some fans, and keyboard nationalists quickly took offence when Messi played in Japan, a few days later. The furore has dominated Chinese social media over the last few weeks, and even led to the cancellation of some upcoming Chinese matches with the Arg...
Feb 19, 2024•40 min
At last count, the Chinese Communist Party has 98 million members, more people than the population of Germany. Its membership also continues to grow, making it one of the most successful and resilient political parties of the last a hundred years, perhaps with the exception of India’s BJP, which boasts 180 million members. And yet the CCP's track record is strewn with bloody crackdowns and systematic persecution. So what would drive someone to join the CCP, and what accounts for its success? Do ...
Feb 05, 2024•47 min
Today, the US and China are at loggerheads. There’s renewed talk of a Cold War as Washington finds various ways to cut China out of key supply chains and to block China’s economic development in areas like semiconductors and renewables. There’s trade, of course, but the imbalance in that (some $370 billion in 2022) tilts in China’s favour and only serves as another source of ammunition for America’s Sinosceptics. China, on the other hand, is also decoupling in its own way, moving fast to cut its...
Jan 22, 2024•53 min
India is the fifth largest economy in the world, and now has a population larger than China’s. It’s no surprise, then, that officials in Washington often see India as a powerful non-western bulwark to growing Chinese power. On this podcast, I look at where China and India’s rivalry comes from. How much have long-lasting skirmishes on the China-Indian border damaged relations? How have demographics, economic competition and recent international conflicts affected the relationship between the two ...
Jan 08, 2024•45 min
Taiwan goes to the polls in just over a month. This is an election that could have wide repercussions, given the island’s status as a potential flashpoint in the coming years. The incumbent President, Tsai Ing-wen, is coming to the end of two elected terms, meaning that she cannot run again. Her party’s chosen successor is William Lai – Lai Ching-te – who is the current vice president. For most of this year, he has been facing off opposition from the Kuomintang, the biggest opposition party in T...
Dec 11, 2023•43 min
Across the span of China, a country as big as Europe, there are countless regional dialects and accents – perhaps even languages. Often, they're mutually unintelligible. The Chinese call these ‘fangyan’, and each Chinese person will likely be able to speak at least one fangyan, while also understanding Standard Mandarin, the official language of the People's Republic. It means that the Chinese are more multilingual than you might think. But it also means that the question of language is inherent...
Nov 28, 2023•44 min
Controlling history is key to the Chinese Communist Party’s control of the country. Whether it’s playing up the ‘century of humiliation’, or whitewashing past mistakes like the Great Leap Forward or the Tiananmen Protests, the Party expends huge effort and resources on controlling the narrative. That’s why it’s so important and interesting to look at those Chinese people who are documenting the bits of history that the Party doesn’t want you to know about. They interview survivors from Communist...
Nov 13, 2023•35 min
All cultures care about their cuisine, but the Chinese must have one of the most food-obsessed cultures in the world. It may be because we have the best food... Those listeners of Chinese Whispers who’ve been to China will know exactly what I’m talking about. For those of you who haven’t, you may have come across the classic Chinese takeaway with dishes like sweet and sour pork, or you may like Cantonese dim sum, and some of you may be big fans of Sichuanese cooking. But China has so much more t...
Oct 30, 2023•50 min
When China brokered a historic detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran earlier this year, it seemed that a new phase in world history – and certainly in Chinese foreign policy – had opened up. Instead of the US being a policeman of the world, it was the rising power, China, that was stepping into that role. Whereas Chinese foreign policy had previously only really cared about promoting trade and silencing dissidents, it seemed that perhaps, now, Beijing was taking a more leadership role in global ...
Oct 16, 2023•43 min
In 2010, David Cameron and George Osborne ushered in what they called ‘a golden era’ with China, the world’s rising superpower. They argued that Britain could be China’s best friend in the West. Thirteen years later, after a global pandemic, up to a million interned in Xinjiang, and a Communist Party General Secretary seemingly keen to roll back democratic progress in the mainland and in Hong Kong, that policy looks ill-thought-out, at best. But are we at risk of swinging the other direction now...
Oct 02, 2023•1 hr 2 min
Two years ago, Richard Moore, head of MI6, said that China was now the organisation’s ‘single greatest priority’. Parliamentarians and the British public have been starkly reminded of this by last week’s news that a parliamentary researcher had been arrested on suspicion of spying for China. On this episode, we won’t be commenting on the ins and outs of that case, but talking more generally about Chinese espionage. What forms does it take, what are its goals and how successful are the Chinese se...
Sep 18, 2023•32 min
For thousands of years, Confucianism has run through the fabric of Chinese society, politics and culture. Decades of Communism has taken its toll on China, so can it still be considered a Confucian country? Joining the episode is one of the world’s leading experts on the philosophy, Professor Daniel Bell. In 2017, he was appointed the dean of Shandong University, an unusual appointment for a foreigner in China but one based on his expertise in Confucianism, in the province of Confucius’s birth. ...
Sep 04, 2023•29 min
178 miles to the east of Beijing, there’s a beach resort called Beidaihe. The water is shallow and the sand is yellow and fine. Luxurious holiday villas dot the coastline. Starting from the 1950s, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have moved their families and work to Beidaihe in the summer, making the beach resort something of a summer capital. Secrecy clouds the gatherings, and though this tradition continues, today the resort seems to serve a much more leisurely purpose when the CCP visi...
Aug 21, 2023•26 min
At the end of last year, some thought that the Chinese economic recovery after three years of zero Covid could happen just as fast as zero Covid itself ended being government policy. I admit, that included me. And yet, more than halfway into 2023, that recovery looks increasingly elusive. The Chinese economy has failed to shake off its own long Covid while other structural problems have reared their heads. What does the future hold for the Chinese economy? Is this the new normal? And if so, is t...
Aug 07, 2023•41 min
In the 1800s, Qing China’s final century, European powers were expanding eastwards. The industrialised West, with its gunboats and muskets, and the soft power of Christianity, pushed around the dynasty’s last rulers. But was this period more than just a time of national suffering and humiliation for China? The British Museum's ongoing exhibit, China’s hidden century , tells the story of Qing China’s final decades. The more than 300 exhibits tell a story not only of decline, but of a complicated ...
Jul 24, 2023•37 min
It’s now a week since the Wagner Group revolted against the Kremlin. Though the dramatic uprising was quelled within 24 hours and the group’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is now exiled to Belarus, the episode will have lasting impact on President Putin’s authority. Among those closely watching the events unfold would have been the Chinese leadership, who sent out a statement of support for Putin, but only after it was clear that the revolt had been put down. What will those in Zhongnanhai make of ...
Jun 30, 2023•36 min
The word ‘West’ is often used as a shorthand to describe liberal democracies in Europe, and perhaps in Asia too, such that we’ll often talk about ‘the West’s attitude to China’, or the ‘West’s relations with China’. But this is at best a lazy shorthand – because when you dig a little deeper, it’s clear that there is no unified West on China. On this episode, I'm joined by Noah Barkin, senior advisor at the Rhodium Group and author of the Watching China in Europe newsletter with the German Marsha...
Jun 19, 2023•39 min
In much of the conversation surrounding China and Taiwan, the question of invasion seems to be a ‘when’ not an ‘if’. But is an invasion really so inevitable? No one knows for sure, of course, but there are good reasons to think that speculations of a war have been overblown. For one, the economic links between Taiwan and China mean that their respective interests are not so zero sum. For another, China may well be causing serious damage to itself through an invasion. Former diplomat Charles Part...
Jun 05, 2023•41 min
The mail-order bride industry is booming – but today's international dating doesn't look as it used to. It turns out that it’s not so much young and uneducated Chinese women looking to marry out of the country anymore, and more middle aged and financially well off divorcees, looking for something different. The mail order bride industry is changing as the women involved are becoming more empowered with their growing wealth – and more demanding. On this episode, I speak to sociologist Monica Liu,...
May 15, 2023•36 min
Hidden in March’s GDP figures was a shocking statistic – a fifth of Chinese 16 to 24 year olds are out of work. This is a near record high, and the economic background to a fresh wave of disillusionment among China’s young. It has led to the creation of a new meme - you’ve heard of lying flat, but young people are now comparing themselves to a Republican-era literary character, Kong Yiji. On this episode, I’m joined by the journalist Karoline Kan, author of Under Red Skies: The Life and Times of...
May 01, 2023•32 min
Just before Christmas, it was reported that the billionaire Jack Ma had moved to Tokyo after getting into trouble with the Chinese authorities. If he's still living there, he'd be one of several well known Chinese who seems to have made Japan their home after run ins with Beijing. In so doing, they’re following in the footsteps of those who came over a century ago – other Chinese exiles who holed out in Japan because of a hostile political environment back home. This episode is all about how imp...
Apr 17, 2023•49 min
Until a few years ago, Hollywood dominated Chinese cinemas. In the People’s Republic, Marvel’s superhero romps were the people’s favourite, with Avengers: Endgame taking in over £510 million at Chinese box offices. Hollywood is desperate to crack the Chinese market – after all, it’s a country with a fifth of the world’s population and a growing middle class. But there’s just one problem – the small issue of the Chinese Communist Party, which tightly controls the films people can see. Since the s...
Apr 03, 2023•32 min
As Xi Jinping visits Vladimir Putin in Russia this week, this episode of Chinese Whispers is returning to one of the missions of this podcast series – to look at things as the Chinese see them. My guest today is Zhou Bo, a retired Senior Colonel of the People’s Liberation Army whose military service started in 1979. He is now a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University. He’s an eloquent and informed advocate of Beijing’s perspective. On the podcas...
Mar 20, 2023•52 min
The Chinese Communist Party likes to blame its domestic political problems on foreign interference, and it has done so since the days of Chairman Mao. But sometimes, does this paranoia, this narrative, have a point? Or at least during the depths of the Cold War, when the United States, via the CIA, was countering communism across the world through so-called ‘covert operations’. My guest today is Professor John Delury, a historian at the Yonsei University in Seoul, and author of a new book lookin...
Mar 06, 2023•47 min
Every protest needs an anthem, and for the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, 'Nothing to My Name' by Cui Jian became that emblem. Cui was one of China's earliest rockers, taking inspiration from the peasant music of China's northwest and fusing it with the rock 'n' roll that was beginning to arrive in the country. It put rock music – and the Chinese interpretation of it – under the national spotlight. On this episode I talk to Kaiser Kuo, host of the China Project's Sinica podcast, who also happen...
Feb 20, 2023•35 min
A few months ago, an intriguing article in the Washington Post shed light on the latest situation Xinjiang, the western region of China where the Uighur minority live. The two journalists, Eva Dou and Cate Cadell, saw on their travels around the region last summer that many of the infamous re-education camps had been shut down, or turned into quarantine centres. A new phase of Beijing’s campaign in Xinjiang seems to have started. So what’s really going on there now, and what does this mean for t...
Feb 06, 2023•42 min
Three years ago, as people across China welcomed the Year of the Rat, a new virus was taking hold in Wuhan. In London, the conversation at my family’s New Year dinner was dominated by the latest updates, how many masks and hand sanitisers we’d ordered. Mercifully, Covid didn’t come up at all as we welcomed the Year of the Rabbit this weekend, though my family in China are still recovering from their recent infections. The zero Covid phase of the pandemic is well and truly over. So what better ti...
Jan 23, 2023•48 min
Should Confucius Institutes be shut down? There are hundreds of these centres across six continents, funded by the Ministry of Education, with the stated goal of public education on and cultural promotion of China. They offer classes on language, history and culture of China, and some would say they help to plug a crucial shortage of Chinese language skills in host countries, especially across the West. And yet, these have become deeply controversial. Criticism of the institutes range from their...
Jan 09, 2023•30 min
Over the last few hundred years, China has had a difficult and complicated relationship with foreigners. On the one hand, they added to the country’s intellectual richness by introducing western philosophy and science; and on the other, these contributions often came accompanied by guns and gunboats. And today, out of a country of 1.4 billion, there are fewer than one million foreigners living there. So what is it like to try to make China one’s home if you were British or anything else? On the ...
Dec 12, 2022•39 min
Comparisons with 1989’s Tiananmen Square protests are too often evoked when it comes to talking about civil disobedience in China. Even so, this weekend’s protests have been historic. It’s the first time since the zero Covid policy started that people across the country have simultaneously marched against the government, their fury catalysed by the deaths of ten people in a locked down high rise building in Xinjiang. Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Xi’An, Urumqi, Nanjing (my home city) have all seen p...
Nov 29, 2022•40 min
