The U.S. election is over, and Donald Trump’s pundit-defying victory over Hillary Clinton has stunned and surprised people all over the world. In China — where activity on Weibo and WeChat indicated strong support for Trump among netizens both in China and in the U.S. — are elites and the Communist Party leadership happy with the outcome? Or would they have rather seen a Clinton victory, preferring the familiarity and stability that a Hillary Clinton administration would have represented, despit...
Nov 10, 2016•51 min
When journalist Bill Lascher received an old typewriter from his grandmother and was told it belonged to “my cousin the war correspondent,” he set off on a search to learn more about the life of Melville (“Mel”) Jacoby, who reported from the front lines of the conflict in China during World War II. Mel and his wife, Annalee Whitmore Jacoby, met many of the key figures of the day, from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek to General Douglas MacArthur; worked as propagandists for the KMT; and ended up fl...
Nov 03, 2016•46 min
Andy Rothman has interpreted the Chinese economy for people who have serious and practical decisions to make since his early career heading up macroeconomic research at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. He is now an investment strategist for Matthews Asia, where he continues to focus on the Chinese economy and writes the Sinology column. His analysis often diverges from what’s in the headlines, and the contrast between Andy’s interpretation and the dominant, deeply gloomy media narrative of the last ...
Oct 27, 2016•55 min
China’s legal system is much derided and poorly understood, but its development has, in many ways, been one of the defining features of the reform and opening-up era. Rachel Stern, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Berkeley, has researched the contradictions, successes and failures of China’s changing approach to governance and legal oversight of society. She has also written a book, Environmental Litigation in China: A Study in Political Ambivalence, whic...
Oct 20, 2016•49 min
On this week’s episode, our guest Ma Tianjie, editor of the bilingual environmental website China Dialogue and the blogger behind Chublic Opinion, untangles the complexities and contradictions of online discussions in China. Tianjie shares insights into three key events in China’s public-opinion landscape that inflamed hordes of online commentators: a shocking family murder-suicide; a famous actor’s cheating spouse; and a mass online action in the name of patriotism against a popular film direct...
Oct 13, 2016•43 min
The first day of 2016 marked the official end of China’s one-child policy, one of the most controversial and draconian approaches to population management in human history. The rules have not been abolished but modified, allowing all married Chinese couples to have two children. However, the change may have come too late to address the negative ways the policy has shaped the country’s demographics and the lives of its citizens for decades to come. In this podcast, Jeremy and Kaiser talk with Mei...
Oct 06, 2016•55 min
In 2009, Michael Manning was working in Beijing for a state-owned news broadcaster by day, but he spent his nights selling bags of hashish. His position with CCTV was easy and brought him into contact with Chinese celebrities, while his other trade expanded his social circle and grew his bank account. His dual life came to an end on March 15 when a team of undercover officers knocked on his door as he was taking delivery of a package. That night, authorities hauled him to Beijing No. 1 Detention...
Sep 28, 2016•59 min
Fakes, knockoffs, pirate goods, counterfeits: China is notorious as the global manufacturing center of all things ersatz. But in the first decade after the People’s Republic joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, a particular kind of knockoff began to capture the public imagination: products that imitate but do not completely replicate the designs, functions, technology, logos and names of existing branded products. An old Chinese word meaning “mountain fortress” — shanzhai — was repurpose...
Sep 22, 2016•49 min
What is the Chinese-American identity? How has the rise of China affected American attitudes toward ethnically Chinese people in the United States and elsewhere? How do the 3.8 million Chinese-Americans impact U.S.-China relations, and what role could or should they play in easing tensions between the two great powers? This episode is a conversation with Frank H. Wu, chair of the Committee of 100, a nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging constructive relations between the people of the ...
Sep 15, 2016•1 hr 7 min
What is the state of the art of artificial intelligence (AI) in China and the United States? How does language recognition differ for Chinese and English? And what’s up with self-driving cars? To answer these and many other questions, Kaiser and Jeremy talk to Andrew Ng, founder and chairman of Coursera, an associate professor in the department of computer science at Stanford University, and the chief scientist of Baidu, where he heads up the company’s research on deep learning and AI. The discu...
Sep 08, 2016•43 min
Renowned as a trading town during the Qing dynasty, the eastern city of Yiwu again became famous for its markets after China's economic reforms kicked in during the 1980s. Since then, the metropolis of 1.2 million people has transformed into a hub of the nation's supply chains, attracting merchants from around the globe searching for cheap Christmas decorations, lighters, pens and millions of other trinkets. Check out the SupChina backgrounder for more info. In this episode of Sinica, Kaiser and...
Sep 01, 2016•41 min
This year marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, a chaotic decade of Chinese history made infamous in the West through books such as Wild Swans and Life and Death in Shanghai, which describe in horrific detail the suffering endured by millions of people. Most histories of the period focus on violence committed by the Red Guards, the imprisonment of people in cow sheds and other terrifying acts, but Paul Clark's book examines the art of the era. For this episode ...
Aug 25, 2016•38 min
Jim Millward is one of the world’s leading scholars on Xinjiang and Central Asia, and the author of many books and articles, including Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759-1864, and The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford. In this week’s Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy talk to Jim about the myths and histories of the Silk Road and a continent’s worth of related subjects: Xi Jinping's signature effort to revive the Silk Road through th...
Aug 18, 2016•55 min
This episode of Sinica is a wide-ranging conversation with Cheng Li (李成), one of the most prominent international scholars of elite Chinese politics and its relation to grassroots changes and generational shifts. He discusses the historical rise and fall of technocracy, corruption and the campaigns against it, power factions within the Communist Party and the new dynamics of the Xi Jinping era. Cheng Li has authored and edited numerous books and articles on subjects ranging from the politics beh...
Aug 11, 2016•54 min
In this episode of Sinica, Clay Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody who has written about the internet and its effects on society since the 1990s, joins Kaiser and Jeremy to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of China's tech industry and the extraordinary advances the nation has made in the online world. The hour-long conversation delves into the details and big-picture phenomena driving the globe's largest internet market, and includes an analysis of Xiaomi's innovation, the struggles ...
Aug 04, 2016•1 hr 7 min
This episode, Jeremy and Kaiser head to the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, to speak with Professor Lyle Goldstein, the author of Meeting China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging US-China Rivalry. Lyle discusses how the United States could accommodate China’s rise without sacrificing American interests by using “cooperation spirals,” the opposite of an escalation spiral. His ideas are sure to surprise those who believe everyone connected to the U.S. military is a hawk. Please t...
Jul 28, 2016•56 min
This live recording of Sinica at the Smyth Hotel in New York City on July 13 features the journalists Mary Kay Magistad and Gady Epstein discussing the increasingly complex "frenemyship" of China and the United States. They also talk about the South China Sea, the role of "old China hands," and how the Middle Kingdom is changing the world and being changed by it. The title of the episode is taken from Mary Kay's radio show and podcast, Whose Century Is it? Mary Kay is a veteran radio journalist ...
Jul 21, 2016•47 min
This week, Kaiser sits in the guest chair and tells us about his 20-plus years of living in China. He recounts being the front man for the heavy metal band Tang Dynasty and the group's tour stops in China's backwater towns, shares his feelings on moving back to the United States with his family, and discusses the future of the Sinica Podcast. The conversation with Jeremy, Ada Shen and David Moser is one of many 'exit interview' episodes with journalists who are departing China after a long stay....
Jul 14, 2016•53 min
Rob Schmitz, China correspondent for American Public Media’s Marketplace, has been living in the nation on and off since 1995. He is the author of Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road, a book about the people living and working on Changle Lu in Shanghai. You can read the fourth chapter here. Many of the characters who Rob writes about are waidiren — people who moved to Shanghai from elsewhere and tried to make a living by catering to the tastes of well-off residents...
Jul 06, 2016•45 min
Jiayang Fan is a staff writer for The New Yorker who moved from Chongqing to North America when she was seven years old. Despite her inability to drink alcohol because of an acetaldehyde dehydrogenase deficiency common to many East Asians, she covered the cocktail bars scene — among other topics — for the magazine for several years as a contributor before joining the publication full-time in 2016. She still occasionally writes restaurant and bar reviews, but her recent work has delved into China...
Jun 30, 2016•52 min
Adam Segal is the Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow for China Studies and director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book, The Hacked World Order, provides an in-depth exploration of the issues that most states and large companies now confront in cyberspace. It covers everything from the Twitter wars over Gaza to German reactions to the Snowden leaks. Our conversation focuses on how China sees cyberwarfare, cyberespionage, internet secu...
Jun 23, 2016•50 min
In this episode of Sinica, we present an in-depth interview with Arthur Kroeber, the founding partner and head of research for Gavekal Dragonomics, an independent global economic research firm, and the editor-in-chief of its journal, China Economic Quarterly. Arthur's new book, China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know, superbly explores China's astonishing expansion during the "reform and opening up" period and the challenges the country now faces as growth slows. He provides a clear-eyed ta...
Jun 16, 2016•1 hr 3 min
In this week's episode of Sinica, we are proud to announce that we're joining forces with SupChina. We're also delighted that our first episode with our new partner is a conversation with President Stephen Orlins and Vice President Jan Berris of the National Committee on United States–China Relations, recorded at their offices in Manhattan. Since 1966, the same year that China's Cultural Revolution began, the National Committee has been the standard bearer for a deeper understanding of the incre...
Jun 03, 2016•50 min
Fifty years ago, Mao Zedong launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, inaugurating a decade of political turmoil with his calls for young people to "bombard the headquarters." In this special live edition of our podcast recorded at The Bookworm Literary Festival in March, Kaiser Kuo and David Moser welcome Melinda Liu, the longtime China bureau chief of Newsweek for a discussion of the 50th anniversary of this definitive event. Melinda shares stories about her brother, who remained in ...
May 15, 2016•1 hr 19 min
The immense popularity of social media has afforded China watchers a terrific window onto public opinion in China. In recent years, a slew of English-language websites have emerged to interpret the various trends, phenomena, discourse and debates on the Chinese internet for non-Chinese audiences, but for our money, the very best of the bunch is Chublic Opinion — public opinion with Chinese characteristics. Written by Ma Tianjie, a graduate of Peking University who now works for China Dialogue, t...
Apr 20, 2016•48 min
Members of the Politburo are rarely praised for their dancing skills, but consider Xi Jinping's almost flawless execution of a political two-step: first casting himself as the voice of liberal moderation in the face of Bo Xilai's mass propaganda, and then draping himself in the mantle of Maoist China and the Communist Revolution once his position was secure. The changes are enough to prompt anyone to ask: How exactly did this happen and does it even make sense? Today on Sinica we take a look at ...
Mar 20, 2016•51 min
Kaiser and Jeremy recorded today's show from New York, where they waylaid Holly Chang, founder of Project Pengyou and now the Acting Executive Director of the Committee of 100, for a discussion on spying, stealing and Broadway. Yes, you read that right. After catching the Broadway musical Allegiance, which is about the Japanese-American internment camps in WWII, we wanted to do a show discussing the experiences people of Chinese heritage have with racial profiling today, and particularly the exp...
Feb 20, 2016•48 min
Kaiser Kuo and David Moser are joined this week by Howie Southworth and Greg Matza, creators of the independent video series Sauced in Translation, a reality show that journeys into the wilder parts of China in search of local Chinese specialities that can be repurposed into classic American dishes. The show is a great concept, brilliantly executed, and we're delighted to have Howie and Greg here to share some behind-the-scenes stories and talk about how they got started mixing Chinese and Ameri...
Feb 06, 2016•1 hr
With equity markets in free fall, housing prices skipping downwards, foreign reserves plummeting and industrial production on a road trip back to the last decade, it's no surprise that permabears like Gordon Chang are stocking up on popcorn to bask in what they see as the long-due collapse of the Chinese economy. It all raises the question of how bad things are going to get, which leads to the question of how bad they are right now. Joining Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn and David Moser in the stud...
Jan 25, 2016•1 hr
This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser Kuo and David Moser are joined by Deborah Seligsohn, former science counselor for the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and currently a doctoral candidate at the University of California, San Diego, where she studies environmental governance in China. With more than 20 years of China experience, Deborah is one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on the question of China's policy response to issues of air pollution and climate change. Recommendations: "How ...
Jan 08, 2016•1 hr 6 min
