This week on Sinica, we discuss the controversy surrounding the decision by Beijing to selectively replace Mongolian-language instruction in schools in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region with Mandarin — and how people both in Inner Mongolia and in Mongolia are pushing back. We're joined by Christopher Atwood , one of the nation's leading specialists in Mongolian history and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and by Christian Sorace , an assistant professor of political science at C...
Oct 08, 2020•1 hr 14 min
This podcast was recorded as part of the 2020 SupChina Women’s Conference on September 9, 2020. Susan Shirk, chair and research professor of the 21st Century China Center at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at University of California, San Diego, is on Sinica this week. Jeremy, Kaiser, and Susan take a broad look at the bilateral relationship as the U.S. inches toward a presidential election in November. Recommendations: Jeremy: I’m doomsday prepping for the end of democracy by Farhad Ma...
Oct 01, 2020•40 min
Jiayang Fan, friend of Sinica and staff writer for The New Yorker, joins Kaiser and Jeremy for a discussion on her recently published long-form piece, How my mother and I became Chinese propaganda . The three talk about the experiences that informed her writing, her mother, and how this piece has been received in the United States and abroad. 7:27: Drawing the ire from both sides of the discussion on China 28:48: The remembered sense of humiliation in Chinese history 33:49: Losing face, family, ...
Sep 24, 2020•59 min
Since 2010, the China in Africa Podcast has brought balanced, wide-ranging conversations about one of the most consequential developments in the global economy and geopolitics to a worldwide audience. Today, in honor of the 500th episode, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with the show’s co-founders, Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden, about its history and the major trends in Sino-African relations that they've seen in a decade of focusing on China's expanding presence in Africa. Subscribe to the China in ...
Sep 17, 2020•1 hr 6 min
This week, we're delighted to bring you the first episode of Mary Kay Magistad's brand new podcast, On China's New Silk Road . Mary Kay is a veteran China reporter and a dear friend of the Sinica Podcast – a frequent guest in our early days. After she moved back to the States, she created another great podcast called Who's Century It It?, a show that often looked at issues related to China. We know that Sinica's audience would really appreciate her latest series and wanted to share it with you. ...
Sep 11, 2020•45 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Keisha Brown, Mark Akpaninyie, and Leland Lazarus about initiatives they're involved with to increase black representation in China-related fields. Keisha Brown is a historian of modern China who is an assistant professor in the Department of History, Political Science, Geography, and Africana Studies at Tennessee State University. Mark Akpaninyie is a researcher focusing on China's Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese investment abroad, and China-Africa relat...
Sep 10, 2020•1 hr 10 min
This week on Sinica, in a show that was streamed live on August 27, Kaiser and Jeremy examine China’s efforts to fulfill the goal of Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 of eradicating extreme poverty in China by the end of this year. They are joined by two guests: Gāo Qín 高琴 is a professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work and the founding director of the Columbia China Center for Social Policy . She is a leading authority on China’s social welfare system and published a book titled Welfare, Work, and...
Sep 03, 2020•1 hr 4 min
In a show taped in May, Kaiser chats with New York–based rapper Bohan Phoenix, who has gained audiences in both the U.S. and China, and Allyson Toy, his manager, a Chinese American who has worked on cross-cultural music promotion and lived in Shanghai for a few years before returning to the U.S. in 2018. In a wide-ranging discussion, they look at hip-hop’s development in China, its relationship with African-American culture, and the travails of bridging two worlds as a Chinese-American hip-hop a...
Aug 27, 2020•1 hr 21 min
This episode of the Sinica Podcast, recorded in June 2017, is running as a bonus this week. The arrest of Stephen Bannon yesterday on August 20, 2020, has brought renewed media attention to Guō Wénguì 郭文贵, a business associate of Bannon’s who is wanted by the Chinese government. The Wall Street Journal has recently reported that the federal authorities are examining the pair’s business dealings. Alexandra Stevenson and Mike Forsythe, journalists for the New York Times, joined Kaiser and Jeremy i...
Aug 21, 2020•56 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Leland Lazarus, an American diplomat stationed in Barbados. Leland is a China specialist, and the conversation focuses on the U.S. response to growing Chinese influence in the Caribbean — an area that the U.S. has long considered its backyard, and a region that is home to many of the states that still maintain diplomatic relations with the Republic of China or Taiwan. 7:41: Beijing’s diplomatic aspirations 12:28: How China is getting involved in i...
Aug 20, 2020•51 min
Susan Thornton, former senior U.S. diplomat, returns to the Sinica Podcast this week. This conversation was recorded during the Princeton U.S.-China Coalition virtual event on August 1, 2020. Kaiser and Susan discuss the value of American diplomacy with China and if such engagement can help salvage what remains of a deeply strained bilateral relationship between China and the United States. 9:27: Swapping diplomacy for machismo at the State Department 23:06: The sharp falloff in candidates enter...
Aug 13, 2020•54 min
This week, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Adam Tooze, professor of history at Columbia University and author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World , about the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the U.S. and China, and how it has affected their position in the emerging geopolitical contest. 6:45: American power and political authority 14:01: China’s power during the pandemic 20:27: Trump’s deliberate strategy of “stress testing” 33:24: The Trump administration’s full-court pre...
Aug 06, 2020•1 hr 2 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Sir Danny Alexander, vice president and corporate secretary of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and former Liberal Democrat MP and chief secretary to the Treasury of the United Kingdom. Sir Danny gives an overview of how Asia’s financial sector has been impacted by COVID-19. 5:27: The United Kingdom’s decision to join AIIB 11:49: AIIB and its accountability framework in decision making 25:16: How U.S.-China relations have affected AIIB 34:00: What A...
Jul 30, 2020•46 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy talk to Wall Street Journal reporters Bob Davis and Lingling Wei about their great new book, Superpower Showdown: How the Battle Between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War . 5:11: The increasingly insulated Chinese political elite 18:08: Chinese import competition and its effect on U.S. manufacturing employment 28:27: Líu Hè 刘鹤 and internal politics within Chinese trade negotiations 41:28: Chinese negotiators’ perceptions of their American counterparts 1...
Jul 23, 2020•1 hr 29 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Andy Purdy, chief security officer of Huawei USA, and Paul Triolo, practice head of geotechnology at the Eurasia Group. They explore the complexities of the 5G ecosystem, challenges to cybersecurity on 5G networks, the process of standards setting in advanced telecommunications, and how the Trump administration's animus toward Huawei might ultimately handicap the U.S. in this vital emerging technology. 5:18: What 5G will enable us to do 18:06: 5G standard s...
Jul 16, 2020•1 hr 3 min
Late on the night of June 15, a deadly melee erupted on the banks of the Galwan River, in a disputed region called Ladakh, high in the mountains between China and India. To help guide a discussion on this landmark event in China-India relations, Kaiser welcomes back Ananth Krishnan, a longtime correspondent for The Hindu, who is based in Beijing. Ananth discusses the context of the clash, which pits two massive, nuclear-armed states with increasingly nationalistic populations and growing regiona...
Jul 09, 2020•52 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser speaks with Michael Berry, the translator of the Wuhan-based writer Fang Fang’s controversial Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City . Michael discusses Fang Fang’s body of work and how her daily online posts on WeChat (which were compiled to become her book) drew the ire of critics who have denounced the diary as an act of national betrayal and have even leveled threats against both the author and the translator. Michael Berry is a professor of contemporary ...
Jul 02, 2020•51 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Bloomberg’s chief economist, Tom Orlik, about his new book, China: The Bubble That Never Pops . A longtime resident of Beijing, Tom wrote for the Wall Street Journal before joining Bloomberg as chief Asia economist. His book argues that Beijing's leaders have learned valuable lessons from their own history and from the experiences of other countries, and applied them well to China's own economy. 5:33: The bears have it wrong on China 10:08: Debt obligations...
Jun 25, 2020•1 hr 9 min
This week on Sinica, we continue with the ongoing California series of podcasts that Kaiser recorded last winter, and present a conversation taped in December, when he chatted with Margaret (Molly) Roberts, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. Molly also co-directs the China Data Lab at the 21st Century China Center, and her latest book, Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall , takes a deep, data-driv...
Jun 18, 2020•51 min
This week, Kaiser and Jeremy speak with Michael Schuman, a reporter and writer who’s been covering China for 23 years, about his new book, Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World . The book sets out to present world history as China has understood it, and what that understanding of history tells us about what the China of today really wants. 11:12: Notable historical books on China that have withstood the test of time 17:48: What Chinese exceptionalism means 34:45: When historic...
Jun 11, 2020•54 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Max Fisher, one of The Interpreter columnists for the New York Times, on what U.S. media coverage got right — and wrong — about the outbreak of COVID-19 in China, and the concerning parallels between 2002 and 2020. 8:33: American media coverage of the outbreak 15:14: Dehumanizing the disease in China 22:17: The role of the media in American political discourse 39:11: Moving the American consensus point on China Recommendations: Max: The Farewell , by Lulu W...
Jun 04, 2020•56 min
In this second half of our interview with Kishore Mahbubani, a former UN ambassador of Singapore, he talks to Kaiser about the perils of American exceptionalism, the poverty of strategic thinking in Washington, and the view of U.S.-China competition from the rest of the world. His latest book, Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy , is a bracing read, unsparing in its criticisms of Chinese and American strategic blunders, and its tough-love approach is sure to rankle. 8:52: Co...
May 28, 2020•1 hr 1 min
In the first part of this two-part conversation, Kishore Mahbubani, a former UN ambassador of Singapore, returns to Sinica to chat with Kaiser about his latest book, Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy . It’s a bracing read, unsparing in its criticisms of Chinese and American strategic blunders, and its tough-love approach is sure to rankle. Part 2 will run next week. 12:46: Contrasting the geopolitical challenges posed by China and Russia 23:03: The core pillars of American...
May 21, 2020•58 min
No, not that Gordon Chang. The other one: the good one. Gordon H. Chang is a professor of American history at Stanford University, where he is also the Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities and the senior associate vice provost for undergraduate education. In this prelapsarian podcast, taped on December 19, Gordon chats with Kaiser about the rising tide of Sinophobia — presaging things to come once Trump really started fanning the flames during the present pandemic. 12:15: American perceptions...
May 14, 2020•50 min
A congressional bill and a draft executive order threaten to prevent U.S. government agencies from using drones made in China or that contain Chinese components. Concerns over security issues may end successful programs by the Department of the Interior and other agencies using Chinese-made drones for a huge range of purposes. Brendan Schulman, vice president for public policy and legal affairs of leading Chinese drone maker DJI, joins Kaiser and Jeremy to discuss. 3:16: A history of DJI 16:04: ...
May 07, 2020•1 hr
Literature professor and cineaste Jiwei Xiao, who grew up in Wuhan and whose mother still lives there, published a piece in the New York Review of Books about watching the coronavirus pandemic unfold — first at a distance in Wuhan, then up close in the U.S., where she now resides. In this episode, Jiwei joins Kaiser and Jeremy to discuss her experiences. 11:56: China’s initial response to the outbreak 16:18: Fang Fang’s comments on China’s response to COVID-19 25:09: Emerging literature on the p...
Apr 30, 2020•1 hr 1 min
For our 10th anniversary show, Kaiser and Jeremy recorded live on Zoom, shared some reminiscences, reflected on how China and the podcast have changed in the years since they started the show, and took questions from listeners who tuned in. A video version of the podcast is available here . 8:05: A bird’s-eye view of Western media coverage of China 26:52: The demise of area studies, and the rise of disciplines in China studies 36:59: How to keep up with current events in China 44:51: A discussio...
Apr 23, 2020•1 hr 51 min
In a show taped on March 2, before the full force of COVID-19 had hit the U.S., Kaiser and Jeremy chatted with Parsifal D'Sola Alvarado about China's strategy in the resource-rich but economically devastated Venezuela. Parsifal is a co-founder of the Andrés Bello China-Latin America Research Foundation and a foreign policy adviser to Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó. 2:47: China-Venezuela relations before Hugo Chávez 11:29: Popular attitudes toward China under Chávez 30:27: Between Madur...
Apr 16, 2020•54 min
Liú Déhǎi 刘德海, master of the pipa , a type of Chinese lute, died at the age of 83 on April 11, 2020. Liu was born in Shanghai in 1937. He received his early music education there before the Communist victory in 1949, and went on to become one of the idealistic young musicians who tried to form a specifically Chinese orchestral tradition. He learned a number of traditional instruments but became famous for playing the pipa, as well as for arranging and composing for it. Among many other achieveme...
Apr 13, 2020•16 min
In a show taped in late February, Kaiser chats with Barbara Finamore, senior attorney and senior strategic director, Asia, for the Natural Resources Defense Council, who shares her perspective on China's impressive progress in curbing greenhouse gas emissions, reducing the price of renewable energy, and producing electric vehicles. Tune in for a rare bit of optimism in these tough times! 6:05: How much China has invested in renewable infrastructure 14:48: The impetus behind Chinese environmental...
Apr 09, 2020•1 hr 7 min
