This week on Sinica, we welcome back Deborah Seligsohn, assistant professor of political science at Villanova University. Debbi spent October 2022 through early January 2023 in Shanghai and Beijing, experiencing quarantine, testing, and lockdown at firsthand — and witnessing the protests and the sudden reopening. As a close observer of public health issues, she lends valuable perspective to what happened in these critical months. 8:13 – Overview of how zero-COVID impacted different demographics ...
Jan 19, 2023•1 hr 20 min
This week on Sinica, we're proud to introduce you to Susan St. Denis, who joined The China Project full-time recently after running the China Vibe Official TikTok channel for The China Project for the last several months. Kaiser and Susan talk about what people are getting wrong about TikTok, the challenges of presenting complex issues in this medium, and much more! 1:01 – Introducing The China Project’s official TikTok channel: China Vibe TikTok 08:25 – Challenging the assumption that TikTok co...
Jan 12, 2023•45 min
This week on Sinica, we proudly present Episode 1 of the newest season of Strangers in China: Lockdown Part 1: A day in the life. The 2022 Shanghai lockdown came to Clay’s neighborhood early and caught him off-guard. Struggling with his mental health, Clay documents how lockdown works on a granular level giving listeners an audio tour of his neighborhood as it plunges into the uncertainty of all the minutiae of day-to-day life living under the control of the apparatuses that shut down an entire ...
Jan 06, 2023•1 hr 37 min
We proudly present Episode 1 of the new season of Strangers in China, part of the Sinica Network from The China Project. In this season, host Clay Baldo provides an intimate look at the lockdown in Shanghai, from the foreboding that preceded it through the harrowing days of the lockdown itself. Be sure to subscribe to the show, too! Just look up Strangers in China in your podcast app of choice and hit subscribe. 2:21 – A preview of this season of Strangers in China 8:23 – The Shanghai fāngcāng方舱...
Jan 05, 2023•57 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Rebecca Kuang (who writes under the name R.F. Kuang), the author of the best-selling historical fantasy novel Babel. Set in the 1830s in England, the novel’s Chinese-born protagonist sets out to prevent a war with China over the opium trade. It’s a novel about the industrial revolution, labor activism, revolution, and — surprisingly — language, etymology, and translation. 2:28 – On Rebecca's own connections to China and her anxieties about losing the Chines...
Dec 29, 2022•52 min
This week on Sinica, Jude Blanchette (Freeman Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies) and Ryan Hass (Armacost Chair at the John L. Thornton Center at the Brookings Institute) join Kaiser to discuss their new essay in Foreign Affairs , " The Taiwan Long Game: Why the Best Solution Is No Solution .” 3:05 – Reconceptualizing Taiwan as “a strategic problem with a defense component” 6:00 – Why expanding the scope of the Taiwan issue beyond the military dimension should not be con...
Dec 21, 2022•1 hr 3 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy welcome Diana Choyleva and Dinny McMahon, who recently published a report for the Wilson Center on China's efforts to internationalize the Renminbi, its currency. Diana Choyleva is chief economist and founder of Enodo Economics, an independent macroeconomic forecasting consultancy she set up in 2016. Dinny McMahon is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of the book China's Great Wall of Debt . Their report is called “ China’s Quest for Financial...
Dec 08, 2022•58 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Michael J. Mazarr, author of the book Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy , which examines the decision to invade Iraq in March 2003. Mike is a senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation and a former professor at the National War College, and he warns of certain parallels between what happened 20 years ago and the growing sense of urgency and moral imperative to confront China that he now senses in Wash...
Dec 01, 2022•1 hr 4 min
We've got a special bonus episode this week on the protests over the weekend of November 26th-27th in multiple cities around China. Joining Kaiser and Jeremy are old friends David Moser and Jeremiah Jenne, co-hosts of the Barbarians at the Gate podcast, who have 50 years in Beijing between them. David Moser is a linguist, academic administrator, and accomplished jazz pianist and composer. Jeremiah Jenne is a writer and historian. Both David and Jeremiah are still in Beijing, and they offer an on...
Nov 29, 2022•1 hr 7 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser & Jeremy welcome Yuan Yang, a reporter for the Financial Times who was until recently covering technology in Beijing. Now based in London, her beat is China-Europe relations, and on this episode she discusses German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's recent trip to China, and how Europe and European countries are navigating the fraught U.S.-China relationship. 6:09 – Providing a balanced account of China’s tech ecosystem 9:38 – German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's recent trip to...
Nov 23, 2022•54 min
This week on Sinica, in lieu of the regular show we present a keynote address given by Evan Feigenbaum, VP for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, at the recent East Asia Strategy Forum, held on November 1-2 in Ottawa, Canada. The forum is put on annually by the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada — APF Canada — and by the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy. The Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada is a not-for-profit organization focused on Canada’s relations with Asia. Its m...
Nov 17, 2022•1 hr 3 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Anne-Marie Slaughter, a leading American public intellectual who serves as president of New America and was Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department during the first Obama administration. Anne-Marie talks about how collaboration on issues of global concern — pandemics, global warming, and more — requires the U.S. to deprioritize some aspects of its competition with China. 1:59 – Contradictions of the Biden doctrine 5:18 – Reconciling Biden’...
Nov 10, 2022•1 hr 11 min
This week on Sinica, our friends at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs invited us for a live show taping before a small group. Kaiser is joined by Lizzi Lee, MIT-trained economist-turned-reporter who hosts the Chinese-language show "Wall Street Today" as well as The China Project's "Live with Lizzi Lee," both on Youtube; and by Damien Ma, who heads the Paulson Institute's in-house think tank MacroPolo. These two top-shelf analysts of Chinese politics break down what was important — and what w...
Nov 02, 2022•1 hr 1 min
This week on Sinica, Evan Osnos, staff writer for The New Yorker , joins hosts Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn to talk about his new piece on one of the most puzzling figures to come out of China: Guo Wengui, a.k.a. Miles Kwok, who took what he learned about dealing with power and money in China and applied those lessons to the U.S., insinuating himself with leading figures of the American right. Who is this mysterious man, and what is he really after? In an unscripted episode that will bring som...
Oct 27, 2022•58 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Susan Shirk, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Pacific and Research Professor and Chair of the 21st Century China Center at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UCSD, about how the deliberately collective leadership of the Hu Jintao years set the stage for the over-concentration of power under Xi Jinping and created conditions for overreach. She argues that Chinese overreach was met with American overreaction — not just in the ...
Oct 20, 2022•1 hr 6 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy are joined by Sue-Lin Wong, who until recently covered China for The Economist and hosted an eight-part podcast series all about Xi Jinping called The Prince. The podcast features interviews with a wide range of China-watchers, peers of Xi, dissidents, and many others who offer insights into what makes Xi tick. 3:38 – Reason behind naming the podcast “the Prince” 5:53 – Differences between traditional journalism and podcasting 9:52 – The role of Sue-Lin’s m...
Oct 13, 2022•1 hr 7 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy were live in London with a very special guest: Carrie Gracie, whose career with the BBC spanned three decades as a China-based correspondent, news presenter, and China editor. She talks about her podcast series on the Bo Xilai scandal, her longitudinal documentary series on White Horse Village, and her struggle with the BBC to win equal pay for women. 6:02 – Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel and Carrie’s coverage of the Bo Xilai scandal and Chinese elite po...
Oct 06, 2022•1 hr 27 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Minister Xu Xueyuan, Deputy Chief of Mission at the PRC Embassy in Washington, D.C. A few words about the process, in the interest of transparency: Minister Xu’s team did request questions in advance, and they were all accepted without alteration except to suggest that two questions, both related to public diplomacy efforts, be combined. Questions on subjects like Taiwan, Xinjiang, and China’s Zero-COVID policy were all accepted without even any suggestions...
Sep 29, 2022•1 hr 28 min
This week on Sinica, we kick off the new network show, the China-Global South Podcast, with a conversation with the show's hosts and co-founders of the China-Global South Project (formerly the China Africa Project), Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden. Kaiser chats with them about where the show is going, and common misconceptions about China's role in the Global South. 1:45 – Reasons for launching the new China-Global South Podcast 13:50 – What Washington’s framing of China’s activity in the Glob...
Sep 22, 2022•1 hr 12 min
This week on Sinica, Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin join the program to discuss their new book Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control . From Urumqi to Uganda and from Hangzhou to the Bronx, the book explores every facet of technological surveillance from the technocratic mindset that birthed it to its spread, with Beijing's help, to many countries of the developing world. But it also examines the role that U.S. tech companies played i...
Sep 15, 2022•1 hr 27 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back University of Michigan political scientist Yuen Yuen Ang, who discusses a recent piece in the Journal of Democracy titled " How Resilient is the CCP? " The essay examines how China's bureaucracy remains surprisingly competent and even relatively autonomous despite Xi Jinping's highly personalistic style of rule. 3:51 – Summarizing debates on Chinese governance in the current China watcher field 8:43 – Defining the concept of institutionalization and cont...
Sep 08, 2022•1 hr 13 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back the Cornell political scientist Jessica Chen Weiss, who is back in Ithaca after a year spent as a CFR International Affairs Fellow working in the State Department's Office of Policy Planning. She talks about an important essay published in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs , titled "The China Trap: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Perilous Logic of Zero-Sum Competition,” which calls on the U.S. to formulate an affirmative vision for the relationship with ...
Sep 01, 2022•46 min
This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy welcome back Tom Orlik, Bloomberg's chief economist and author of the book China: The Bubble that Never Pops . Ahead of the release of the new, updated edition of his book, we ask him about all that has changed in the two-and-a-half years since the publication of the first edition — and whether the real estate crisis, the Common Prosperity agenda, China's fraying foreign relations, or the COVID lockdowns are finally going to bring about the cras...
Aug 25, 2022•56 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy welcome Leroy Chiao, a NASA astronaut who flew three shuttle missions and served as commander of the International Space Station for over six months. Leroy is also very knowledgeable about China's space program and was the first American astronaut to visit the Astronaut Center of China outside of Beijing. He discusses the abortive history of Sino-American space collaboration, attitudes toward China's space program in the U.S., and China's impressive accompl...
Aug 18, 2022•1 hr 1 min
This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser chats with Ali Wyne, senior analyst at the Eurasia Group's global macro geopolitics practice and author of the brand new book America's Great Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition . Ali's book calls on American policymakers to craft a strategy that is guided by confidence and a clear vision of American renewal and emphasizes America's competitive advantages, rather than being determined by the b...
Aug 11, 2022•1 hr 29 min
In a week dominated by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, Kaiser welcomes John Culver, who served as national intelligence officer for East Asia from 2015 to 2017 and as a CIA analyst focusing on China for 35 years. John offers his perspective on Pelosi's trip and provides important context with a discussion of the last Taiwan Straits Crisis, in 1995-96 — a crisis touched off by Lee Teng-hui's decision to visit Cornell University, his alma mater. John also draws important paralle...
Aug 04, 2022•58 min
This week on Sinica, we offer listeners a sneak preview of one of the new shows coming soon to the Sinica Network: Café & Seda, or Coffee and Silk. While this episode is in English, the podcast will be mostly in Spanish — our first non-English show. The host is Parsifal D'Sola, who is Executive Director of the ABF China Latin America Research Center and a nonresident senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. Parsifal is a native of Venezuela, and his focus is on Sino-Latin Am...
Jul 28, 2022•47 min
This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser chats with Silvia Lindtner of the University of Michigan about her book Prototype Nation . In a wide-ranging conversation, they discuss how China's maker movement inspired the Party leadership to encourage tech entrepreneurship, how Shenzhen rose to such prominence in technology production, the fetishization of the shanzhai movement, and much more. 5:29 How narratives on Chinese tech innovation have shifted 14:10 What made China's technological innovation ...
Jul 21, 2022•1 hr 7 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Paul Triolo, Senior VP for China and Technology Policy Lead at Dentons Global Advisors ASG, formerly and probably better known still as Albright Stonebridge Group. Paul provides an in-depth overview of today’s semiconductor landscape, from export control issues, to the unstable equilibrium between U.S., China, and Taiwan’s industries. He walks us through the strategic importance of semiconductors in U.S. national security considerations — and how unintended...
Jul 15, 2022•1 hr 8 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Villanova University historian Andrew Liu. Andy published an excellent essay in n+1 magazine in April that captured how the eclipse of the "wet-market" theory of COVID origins and its replacement by the "lab-leak" theory illustrates how an old racial form — "Orientalism," which sees countries of Asia as backward, dirty, and barbarous — gave way to what's been termed an "Asiatic" racial form, which reflects anxiety over Asians as hyperproductive, robotic, an...
Jul 07, 2022•57 min
