Prince Han Fei, or Hán Fēizǐ 韓非子, is perhaps the most influential Chinese thinker that many Westerners have never heard of. With Jeremy hosting Sinica this week, we bring to you a conversation recorded in November 2020 featuring writer and journalist Zhā Jiànyīng 渣建英 and Geremie R. Barmé, editor of China Heritage . The three discuss the overlooked salience of the words of Han Fei in understanding modern China, the concept of legalism and its relation to the contemporary interpretation of fazhi (...
May 06, 2021•59 min
This week on Sinica, after an eventful week of climate-change-focused meetings, including U.S. special climate envoy John Kerry’s trip to China, the U.S.-hosted Leaders Summit on Climate convened on April 22 and 23. Kaiser chats with China climate policy specialist Angel Hsu, an assistant professor in the Public Policy Department and the Energy, Environment, and Ecology Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Alex Wang, a professor of law at the University of California, ...
Apr 29, 2021•1 hr 6 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Arthur Jones and Steven Schwankert about their documentary The Six . The film, directed by Jones and produced by James Cameron, focuses on Schwankert’s search for the six Chinese men who survived the sinking of the Titanic on the night of April 14, 1912. Tracing the fate of the men takes Schwankert from New York’s Chinatown to the dells of Wisconsin, from Canada to Australia, and from England to Guangdong Province. What his team discovers is the m...
Apr 22, 2021•1 hr 5 min
On April 16, PBS’s Great Performances will broadcast the world premiere of the documentary Beethoven in Beijing , which tells the story of classical music in China over the last half century through the lens of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s storied relationship with the country, from its first performances in the P.R.C. in 1973 until its most recent tour, in 2018. Along the way, the film profiles established Chinese musicians and composers, like Tán Dùn 谭盾 and Láng Lǎng 郎朗, and introduces us to n...
Apr 15, 2021•58 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Stephanie Studer, China correspondent for The Economist , who recently published a special report in the magazine about China’s “Post-90s” generation; and with Alec Ash, author of the book Wish Lanterns , which looks at a cohort of Chinese youth born between 1985 and 1990. The two explore the apparent contradictions between, on the one hand, the cosmopolitanism and socially progressive attitudes of young Chinese today and, on the other, their increasingly a...
Apr 08, 2021•1 hr 3 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Deborah Seligsohn , who served as the State Department’s Environment, Science, Technology and Health Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing from 2003 to 2007. She is now an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University in Philadelphia, where she currently teaches a course on pandemics and politics. She recalls her firsthand experience with China’s SARS response in 2003, shares her views on how much China improved in the intervening year...
Apr 01, 2021•1 hr 13 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back Ryan Hass , the Michael H. Armacost Chair at the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institute, a senior adviser at the Scowcroft Group and McLarty Associates, and the China Director at the National Security Council during the second Obama administration. Ryan’s new book, Stronger: Adapting America's China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence , lays out a great approach to right-sizing the challenges that China poses in the decade...
Mar 25, 2021•1 hr 10 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with ex-venture capitalist Lillian Li , who moved to China from the U.K. last year and has been looking at China’s tech ecosystem from a unique perspective — combining an investor’s eye, an academic background studying development, a grounding in Chinese language and culture, and a comparative instinct. Lillian shares her views on how technology platforms have become institutions, how the U.S. and China have responded to this development in starkly different way...
Mar 18, 2021•1 hr 16 min
In August 2020, the CGTN anchorwoman Chéng Lěi 成蕾, an Australian citizen, was detained in Beijing. Six months later, she was formally arrested and charged with violations of China’s expansive state secrets law. This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with ABC reporter Bill Birtles (whose involuntary departure from China was linked to Cheng Lei’s case), longtime Beijing-based Financial Times correspondent Lucy Hornby, and Chinese law specialist Donald Clarke, a professor of law at George Washington Uni...
Mar 11, 2021•48 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to talk about the faulty assumptions that American analysts and policymakers continue to make about politics in China — and the flawed policy built on those problematic assumptions. Despite much recent academic research into the behavior of authoritarian states that offer better models for understanding China’s politics, several older and less accurate heuris...
Mar 04, 2021•1 hr 6 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Julie Klinger, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware’s Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences, about rare earths — a family of 17 elements that are essential to the function of modern industry and are indispensable in everyday technology. Julie debunks many of the myths surrounding China and rare earths, and lays out her ideas about why, despite the relative ubiquity of mineable rare earth deposits, China has dominated production of the...
Feb 25, 2021•1 hr 14 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Wall Street Journal correspondent Te-Ping Chen to talk about her just-released collection of short fiction, Land of Big Numbers: Stories . Featuring 10 short stories all set in China or featuring Chinese characters, it showcases both the author’s keen eye for detailed observation and her imaginative powers and offers an unfailingly empathetic look at China from a wide range of disparate angles. Te-Ping even reads a passage from one short story, “Lulu,” wh...
Feb 18, 2021•53 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with three of the guests in a remarkable room on the drop-in voice chat app Clubhouse, which ran for 14 hours on Saturday, February 6. The room, called “Is there a concentration camp in Xinjiang?,” brought thousands of listeners from China and around the world to talk about the ongoing extralegal internment of Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang. We spoke with the Han Chinese filmmaker who started the room (and wishes to remain anonymous); one of the...
Feb 11, 2021•1 hr 12 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser talks with Dan Wang, a Shanghai-based analyst at research firm Gavekal Dragonomics , who also contributes a regular opinion column to Bloomberg. Combining firsthand knowledge of China’s tech sector with broad erudition and a humanist’s perspective, Dan offers a unique take on China’s innovation ecosystem, the country’s efforts to achieve self-sufficiency in technology, and the role of economic growth, fundamental optimism, and inspiration in China’s rise as a tech pow...
Feb 04, 2021•1 hr 18 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Paul Heer about the conundrum of Taiwan — one of the thorniest and most fraught issues confronting the new Biden foreign policy team as it navigates the U.S.-China relationship. Paul is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the National Interest and studies Chinese and East Asian issues. He served as the national intelligence officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015, and was previously a senior analyst at the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence in its China...
Jan 28, 2021•1 hr 8 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with the three authors of a new policy paper from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a relatively new D.C.-based think tank that advocates restraint in U.S. foreign policy. Michael D. Swaine , Jessica J. Lee , and Rachel Esplin Odell authored the report Toward an Inclusive & Balanced Regional Order: A New U.S. Strategy in East Asia , which was published by the Quincy Institute on January 11. In this longer-than-usual episode, they detail their ...
Jan 21, 2021•1 hr 29 min
By the end of 2019, Chinese courts had uploaded some 80 million court cases to a massive, centralized database — a gold mine not only for people working in the legal professions in China, but also for researchers interested in what the court decisions can tell us about Chinese jurisprudence, criminal and civil procedures, and Chinese society more broadly. This week on Sinica, we present a show recorded back in December 2019 — prelapsarian days, before shelter-in-place orders, travel restrictions...
Jan 14, 2021•57 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back former National Security Council China director Ryan Hass , who offers his perspective on the likely direction that the incoming Biden administration will take when it comes to managing the American relationship with China — the most difficult and most consequential of bilateral relationships. Thoughtful and measured as always, Ryan makes a good case for why the Biden team is not, in fact, boxed in by Trump’s antagonism toward China, and will chart a pat...
Jan 07, 2021•55 min
Why have so many prominent critical and dissident intellectuals from China come out vocally in support of Donald Trump? This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy set out to answer that question, and are joined by journalist Ian Johnson of the New York Times and by Lin Yao, a political scientist now earning a law degree at Yale, who writes frequently on Chinese intellectuals and U.S. politics. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#...
Dec 31, 2020•1 hr 17 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with James “Jay” Carter, a professor of history at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, about his terrific new book, Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai , which focuses on horse racing as an unlikely but effective way to tell the story of Shanghai during the Nanjing decade (1928–1938) and World War II. We also talk about the challenges of presenting Chinese history to non-specialists, and about Jay’s weekly column in SupChina, “This Week in Chin...
Dec 25, 2020•52 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Evan Feigenbaum , vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he oversees research in Washington, Beijing, and New Delhi on a dynamic region that encompasses both East Asia and South Asia. Evan also served as deputy assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian Affairs under Condoleeza Rice during the second George W. Bush administration, and as vice chairman of the Paulson Institute, before joining Carne...
Dec 17, 2020•49 min
This week on Sinica, we bring you a conversation with Pallavi Aiyar , a prolific writer and, until 2008, a Beijing-based journalist, and Ananth Krishnan , who reported from China for The Hindu and India Today until 2018. The two chatted with Kaiser and Jeremy as part of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival in November, covering subjects from popular Chinese misconceptions and stereotypes about India to India’s curiosity about — and sparse media coverage of — its powerful neighbor to the...
Dec 10, 2020•1 hr
In this episode of Sinica, which was taped live at the fourth annual NEXT China Conference on November 11, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Yifei Li and Judith Shapiro, co-authors of a new book called China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet . Li, an assistant professor of environmental studies at NYU Shanghai, and Shapiro, the chair of the environmental politics program at American University, tackle the question of whether a state-led authoritarian approach is needed to add...
Dec 03, 2020•35 min
This week on Sinica, we teamed up with Columbia University Press and the Columbia Global Centers to convene a conversation with Brian Dott , a professor of history and Middle Eastern studies at Whitman College and the author of The Chili Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography . Kaiser — who is something of a chili head himself — chats with Brian about how, when, and why the chili pepper came to China and became such a fixture of the cuisines of Sichuan, Hunan, Guizhou, and Yunnan. 7:19: Where chi...
Nov 27, 2020•41 min
This week on Sinica, we present the first installment in a three-part series produced in collaboration with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), highlighting the groundbreaking work of young social scientists who are focused on China. In this episode, Kaiser chats with Jennifer Pan , an assistant professor of communication at Stanford, about three of her research papers that illuminate different aspects of social control in the P.R.C.: the use of the dibao social welfare system , hiring d...
Nov 19, 2020•52 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Rana Mitter , professor of the history and politics of modern China at St. Cross College, Oxford, and director of the University of Oxford China Centre, about his new book, China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism . The book is a meditation on how the evolving official narrative of World War II in contemporary Chinese political discourse shapes not only China’s domestic politics but its foreign policy as well. 8:51: What Chinese natio...
Nov 12, 2020•1 hr 26 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Tobita Chow and Jake Werner about what a progressive U.S. policy toward China should look like. Tobita is the director of Justice Is Global, a special project of People’s Action that is building a movement to create a more just and sustainable global economy and defeat right-wing nationalism around the world. Jake is a Postdoctoral Global China Research Fellow at Boston University's Global Development Policy Center. He is currently researching...
Nov 05, 2020•1 hr 4 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with the Los Angeles–based film producer Peter Shiao about his vision of bringing wuxia 武侠 — a genre that tells stories of chivalrous martial artists with supernatural abilities — to global audiences through comics, graphic novels, and films. The son of renowned martial arts novelist Shiao Yi (蕭逸 Xiāo Yì), who passed away in 2018, Peter wants to create a wuxia storyverse that will be to Chinese martial arts literature what the Marvel Comics Universe has been to ...
Oct 29, 2020•42 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Sebastian Strangio, the Southeast Asia editor at The Diplomat, about his new book, In the Dragon's Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century . The book examines how each of the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (except Brunei) has coped with China's rapid reemergence as a regional superpower, and offers superbly written on-the-ground reportage by a longtime resident of the region. Recommendations: Jeremy: The novel True Gri...
Oct 22, 2020•1 hr 4 min
Since February, a series of tit-for-tat restrictions on and expulsions of journalists in the U.S. and China have resulted in the decimation of the ranks of reporters in the P.R.C. While the bureaus of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post remain open, they've had to make do with reduced staff and journalists reporting from outside of the Chinese mainland — in Taiwan and South Korea. Emily Feng, a reporter with National Public Radio (NPR), is one journalist who is still in ...
Oct 15, 2020•49 min
