The Little Red Podcast

Graeme Smith and Louisa Lim

The Little Red Podcast: interviews and chat celebrating China beyond the Beijing beltway. Hosted by Graeme Smith, China studies academic at the Australian National University's Department of Pacific Affairs and Louisa Lim, former China correspondent for the BBC and NPR, now with the Centre for Advancing Journalism at Melbourne University. We are the 2018 winners of podcast of the year in the News & Current Affairs category of the Australian Podcast Awards. Follow us @limlouisa and @GraemeKSmith, and find show notes at www.facebook.com/LittleRedPodcast/

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Episodes

How To Make Friends And Influence People: Inside the Magic Weapon of the United Front

The Communist Party's shadowy United Front Work Department has emerged stronger than ever before after the most recent government reshuffle. This body, whose job has historically been to win hearts and minds among the Party’s opponents, is now also responsible for all work related to ethnic minority groups, religious management and contact with overseas Chinese. But exactly how does the United Front Work Department gain support for China abroad? In this episode, Graeme is joined by Gerry Groot f...

Apr 09, 2018•44 min

Policing the Contour Lines: China's Cartographic Obsession

China's preoccupation with cartography now seems to be reaching into classrooms, websites and academic journals around the world, with an increasing number of demands for retractions and apologies for maps that do not comport with Beijing's view of its borders. In this episode, John Zinda, a sociologist from Cornell University, and James Miles, China editor for The Economist, join Louisa and Graeme to discuss the politics of cartography in China. Image: Map of China on globe, c/- CHUTTERSNAP on ...

Mar 08, 2018•28 min

Bitter Medicine: China's New Pacific Frontier

China’s aid and growing influence in the South Pacific is causing alarm with an Australian minister recently complaining about Chinese-funded 'roads to nowhere'. In this month's episode, Louisa and Graeme are joined by award winning journalist Jo Chandler to discuss the challenges brought by a wave of Chinese aid and migration to the Pacific’s largest nation, Papua New Guinea. From migrant shopkeepers and counterfeit drugs to rumours of bases and political corruption, China's footprint is expand...

Feb 06, 2018•28 min

Lies, Damned Lies and Police Statistics: Crime and the Chinese Dream

Xi Jinping's Chinese Dream has a dark side exemplified by the emergence of villages specialising in a single type of crime from 'hand-cutting' pickpockets to 'cake-uncles' specialising in accounting fraud. Officially China boasts one of the lowest murder rates in the world, claiming a 43% drop in severe violent crime over the past five years. But Børge Bakken, a specialist in Chinese criminology, argues that all Chinese crime statistics are falsified for political, propaganda and administrative ...

Jan 08, 2018•36 min

BDM: Not As Sexy As The Shark

Reviled in the West, the slimy bottom-feeders known as sea cucumbers or bêche-de-mer (BDM) have recently been described as the ‘the gold of the sea’. Skyrocketing demand for this prized feature of Chinese wedding banquets has driven up the price of bêche-de-mer (lit. ‘worm of the sea’), causing knock-on impacts ranging from sea cucumber smuggling rings to a collapse in sea cucumber stocks to starvation in some parts of the world. In this episode we examine the cautionary tale posed by the fate o...

Dec 04, 2017•26 min

Party Poopers: Can Art Bring Down the Government?

A new brand of Chinese political artists is using the once borderless expanse of cyberspace as a virtual studio, a collaboration space and a digital museum, crowdsourcing and sharing work about China that could never be shown there. But as Beijing’s influence - and censorship – extends beyond China’s borders, being in exile is no longer is a guarantee of safety. As these artists struggle to find ways to vault the Great Firewall, the Chinese government is developing increasingly sophisticated cen...

Nov 06, 2017•33 min

Muzzling the Academy: Policemen, Spooks and Vanishing Archives

Beijing's failed attempt to force Cambridge University Press to censor its own catalogue is just one prong in an escalating campaign to tighten control over China's recent historical record. Western scholars of China are struggling to function in an environment with little access to historical records and increasingly sophisticated censorship of electronic archives, as well as more overt surveillance of their activities and pressure on their Chinese research partners. With censorship and intimid...

Oct 04, 2017•46 min

Haters Gonna Hate: Nationalism on Demand in China and Japan

Under Xi Jinping, history in China is a moving feast. This year, China’s Ministry of Education increased the length of the Second World War by six years, to ‘place a greater emphasis on China’s ‘red revolution.’ And from September, China's rolling out new school textbooks which claim disputed islands in the East China Sea as their own. To drill down into bitter history between the two countries, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Richard MacGregor, who is releasing a new book called Asia's Reckonin...

Sep 05, 2017•45 min

Cooking the News: Xi’s Digital Future

The Chairman of Everything is tightening his grip over the media, pushing control into new spheres ahead of the 19th Party Congress. As the state-run media – traditionally the tongue and throat of the party – moves onto digital platforms, innovations in control include a welter of new regulations and theoretical concepts like the idea of cyber-sovereignty. Louisa and Graeme are joined by David Bandurski and Qian Gang of the China Media Project to discuss innovations in news production and contro...

Aug 07, 2017•39 min

Class: the new dirty word

Chairman Mao urged the Chinese people to never forget class struggle. But they not only forgot, they stopped using the word at all. Louisa and Graeme talk to Wanning Sun from the University of Technology, Sydney and and Yingjie Guo from Sydney University about how class has become a dirty word in China. So much for the workers, peasants and soldiers; in today's China, everyone wants to be middle class, even the new rich. Class anxiety is rife as class mobility is ever harder as traditional route...

Jul 09, 2017•39 min

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