Barbarians at the Gate

Yuanmingyuan, the "Garden of Perfect Brightness," commonly referred to as the Old Summer Palace, was a Qing Dynasty imperial residence comprised of hundreds of buildings, halls, gardens, temples, artificial lakes, and landscapes, covering a land area five times that of the Forbidden City and eight times the size of Vatican City. This expansive compound, once referred to by Victor Hugo as "one of the wonders of the world," now exists only as a sprawl of scattered ruins on the northern outskirts of Beijing, having been thoroughly burned and looted by the French and British over three days in October 1860, in the aftermath of the Second Opium War.

The razed remnants of the glorious gardens have been left in place by the Chinese government as an outdoor museum of China's "Century of Humiliation" at the hands of foreign powers. On the 160th (now 165th) anniversary of the destruction of Yuanmingyuan, Jeremiah and David discuss the political and cultural clashes that led to the action, the significance of the incident for China's national self-image, and the government's attempts to repatriate the massive amounts of looted artifacts found scattered among the museums of Europe and the West. The conversation also explores the changing symbolic significance of the ruins in the context of a rejuvenated and economically powerful China.

It’s just two guys talking China's naval history. In this episode, David and Jeremiah dig into the story of Zheng He, the 15th-century admiral who took China's treasure fleets halfway around the world as Western Europe was just starting to figure out ocean navigation.

Here's a Muslim eunuch who went from prisoner to running the emperor's treasure fleets. The man brought giraffes home as diplomatic gifts and offered up Sri Lankan kings as trophies to his boss. His fleets dwarfed anything Europe had, yet China wasn't really interested in claiming territory, just showing up, trading, and reminding everyone who ran the seas. Then Beijing killed the whole program. Just like that. Done.

Why'd they stop? That's the question. Because when China bailed on blue-water sailing, Portugal and Spain filled the gap. Different game plan entirely.

Flash forward to 2025, David is in Addis Ababa this month watching Chinese construction projects in Ethiopia and he's drawing lines between Zheng He's trade missions and today's Belt and Road. Same waters, same connections, five centuries apart.

What can a eunuch, a giraffe, and a fleet of enormous ships can teach us about the history of globalization?

Picture this: You’re 45 years old, halfway through writing the definitive history of your civilization. Writing this history is the family business, and you’ve made a promise to your dying father to finish his work no matter what, when your boss, who happens to be the Emperor of China, gives you a choice. You can be executed or, if that doesn’t work for your schedule, how about castration?

Sima Qian picked door number two.

If you enjoyed this tale of commitment, consider subscribing or supporting the Substack. Your subscription will cost far less than what Sima Qian paid. We promise.

In this special episode of Barbarians at the Gate, Jeremiah teams up with China Books Review’s Associate Editor Alexander Boyd to dig into the story of history’s most committed writer. Sima Qian didn’t just compile China’s first great historical work—he literally sacrificed his manhood to complete it after defending a friend got him sideways with Emperor Han Wudi.

Jeremiah and Alexander explore what it means to speak truth to power when the consequences are real, why Sima Qian’s model of moral courage feels especially relevant in our current moment of “spiritual castrations,” and whether anyone today has the stones (so to speak) to make that kind of sacrifice for their work.

Sometimes the classics hit different when the world’s gone sideways.

In this encore episode of Barbarians at the Gate, first broadcast in March 2024, John Alekna talks about his fascinating new book Seeking News, Making China: Information Technology and the Emergence of Mass Society. In 20th-century China, the gradual importation and development of information technology had an enormous impact on the way news was disseminated and accessed by the general public. When radio first appeared in the early 1920s, fewer than 8 in 1,000 people had access to newspapers, whereas by the Mao period hundreds of millions of citizens were receiving daily news and information via radio, TV, and shortwave technology.

This book provides an enlightening “meta-historical” account of the evolving communications technologies that fueled the May Fourth Movement, KMT and CCP propaganda campaigns during WWII, and the mass information campaigns of the Mao era, such as the Cultural Revolution. The book describes how the various interlocking information technologies, infrastructure, and communication channels—what Alekna calls the “newsscape”—affected popular opinion, politics, and state power.

John Alekna is an Assistant Professor in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at Peking University.

Teachers are an excitable lot prone to excessive consumption of caffeine and loudly proclaiming that [Insert New Technology Here] will doom a generation to intellectual oblivion. Whether it was television, computers, the Internet, Wikipedia, or now AI, we've seen this panic before.

But in this episode, Jeremiah and David try to do a few deep knee bends and discuss what AI actually means for Chinese language learning. How do we teach when near-perfect translations are waiting on students' phones? How do we integrate AI into our work while putting guardrails on classroom use?

AI might be the greatest learning tool since Pleco, but how do we keep the focus on connecting with actual humans, not impressing silicon tutors? An episode for language teachers, students, and anyone wondering if robots will eventually make them fluent in Mandarin.

Where are our nerds at? David Moser is on summer holiday, and stepping into David's seat for this episode is literary translator Brendan O'Kane. It takes about two minutes for Jeremiah and Brendan to go off the rails, over the edge, and back to the Amilal Courtyard in Beijing ca. 2010 (if you know, you know).

In this wide-ranging conversation, Brendan and Jeremiah rate different levels of dynastic decline on the "fuckery" scale, Brendan reads a translation from Chinese philosopher Mencius, there's discussion of how to best gloss "laowai," if Xi Jinping is "president," "chairman," or something else entirely, a quick debate on whether Matteo Ricci had an eidetic memory or was just really, really smart, and Brendan's adventures battling ICE.

Come with us for a wild ride of Sinological geekdom and summer-style freeflow scholarship.

Jeremiah and David are joined by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, historian of modern China and a longtime interpreter of the country’s shifting place in the world. Originally recorded in 2020, this conversation revisits the Boxer War of 1900—not through the usual lens of siege and rescue, but by examining what followed: the punitive occupation, the fractured international memory, and the long shadow cast by a global media frenzy.

Wasserstrom’s reading reframes the Boxers not as an isolated burst of anti-foreign violence, but as part of a cycle of uprisings and reprisals that shaped modern China’s encounter with the West. He discusses why the term “Boxer Rebellion” obscures more than it reveals, and why “Year of the Boxers” may be a better way to understand the crisis—and its aftershocks.

The episode also explores deeper patterns in Chinese history, including the 60-year cyclical mindset that links 1900 to 1960 and, by some accounts, to 2020. It’s a conversation about repetition, media distortion, and the uneasy symmetry between violence and remembrance.

In this episode we chat with Shanghai-based author and editor Jacob Dreyer, a China watcher who writes with great insight and nuance about the shifting landscape of China-US relations. We touch on questions such as: Is the China model of governance outperforming Western liberal democracy? Is China winning the AI and technology wars? (Spoiler alert: That ship has sailed.) How do the architecture and logic of surveillance and information control systems differ between the U.S. and China? Is the current China-US geopolitical chill drifting toward a hot war? And finally, we unpack the question posed in Jacob’s guest op-ed in the New York Times: Is Trump’s America beginning to look more like China?

This week on the podcast, we explore the role of the horse in Chinese culture with author David Chaffetz, whose new book Raiders, Rulers, and Traders traces the sweeping impact of horse domestication across world civilizations. Chaffetz explains how equestrian cultures not only transformed warfare and mobility in China, but also reshaped the very boundaries of empire and cultural identity. Our conversation follows China’s long and complex relationship with the horse, from defending against nomadic cavalry along the northern frontier to importing prized horses through Silk Road diplomacy. Chaffetz recounts the challenges faced by Chinese dynasties in breeding horses to match the superior mounts of Mongol raiders. We also explore the echoes of China’s horse culture preserved in relics, from paintings and artifacts to the horse statues unearthed among the Terracotta Warriors.

In this classic episode from 2020, we look at Putonghua, the spoken language most people refer to as Mandarin. David wrote a book in 2016 on the evolution of Putonghua in China. What's the point of Putonghua? What is a dialect and what is a language in China? And what's the difference between Mandarin as spoken during the dynastic period, "Guoyu" (National Speech) in the Republican Period, and Putonghua in the PRC? We also get an assist from Zhang Yajun who talks with David about the differences between the spoken language of Northern China, especially around Beijing, and "Standard" Putonghua.