China in the Americas

In this episode I am joined by Barbados's Ambassador to the People's Republic of China, His Excellency Ambassador Francois Jackman. We discussed several major foreign policy and geopolitical themes centred on the Caribbean's diplomatic posture towards China and the North Atlantic.

Ambassador Jackman on Twitter: @francoisjackman

Show Notes

•  Barbados Foreign Policy Fifty Years and Beyond by Amb. Jackman
• The Caribbean also needs to Pivot by Amb. Jackman
• CARICOM Council for Foreign and Community Relations (COFCOR) 
• Cuba-US-Caribbean Relations 
• Overview of China-Barbados Relations
• Organisation of American States (OAS)
• China's economic engagement in the Caribbean (coauthored by me)

Message/Follow me on Twitter: @rasheedguo (for more info on China-Caribbean topics)
Email me: [email protected]

Intro/Outro Music
Rise and Shine by Bunny Wailer

I'm now an Emergent Ventures Fellow! I've received a generous grant from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. The grant will be used to develop this podcast and create more China-Caribbean relations content (newsletter coming soon)! This is all thanks to this episode's guest - Tyler Cowen. He is the Director of the Mercatus Center and an Economics Professor at George Mason University. Tyler is also the coauthor (along with Alex Tabarrok of the Marginal Revolution blog) and host of the Conversations with Tyler Podcast.

Show Notes

• Sir. Arthur Lewis, Nobel Prize winning Economist from St. Lucia
• King Tubby, Jamaican Dub musician
• Hector Hyppolite, Haitian painter (perhaps the most famous)
• José Bedia, Cuban avant garde artist
• Paul Romer, on Jamaican governance failures and diaspora voting
• Delisle Worrell, Caribbean countries need to retire their currencies and Dollarize
• Camile Paglia, on Rihanna (who is Barbadian) 
• Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum (Helsinki, Finland)
• Sibelius Violin Concerto (Ray Chen with GSO)
• McCloskey’s Bourgeois Virtues
• Junot Diaz 'Apocalypse' 
• On suicide in the Caribbean 
• Music in the Castle of Heaven (book) by John Eliot Gardiner
• In The Mood for Love, film by Wong Kar-Wai (my favourite)

Message/Follow me on Twitter: @rasheedguo (for more info on China-Caribbean topics)
Email me: [email protected]

Intro Music:
Chilout/Slum by Gregory Isaacs (Jamaican dub genre)

Outro Music:
Sé pa pou dat by Alan Cavé (Haitian Kompa genre)

Donate
Paxos
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This episode features Wazim Mowla, a Program Assistant at the Atlantic Council Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center Caribbean Initiative. Previously he worked at the Embassy of Guyana and the Embassy of Antigua and Barbuda in Washington DC.

Wazim on Twitter: @WMowla

Show Notes

• The Strange Saga of Taiwan's Short-Lived Office in Guyana
• Caribbean Basin Security Initiative 

Recommendations

• Latin America Confronts the United States: Asymmetry and Influence by Tom Long
• Island People: The Caribbean and the World by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Follow me on Twitter: @rasheedguo

Intro Music
Dreamin' by 53 Thieves

Outro Music
一片漆黑的海 A Dark Sea by Sleeping Brain 眠脑

This episode features Parsifal D’Sola, a Chinese Foreign Policy analyst focused on Sino-Venezuelan relations. He is also the Founder and CEO of the Andrés Bello Foundation – China Latin American Research Center based in Bogota, Colombia.

Parsifal of Twitter: @pdsola

Show notes:

• China, Venezuela, and the New Silk Road in between 
• China in the LAC: Digital Diplomacy During COVID-19
• What is PetroCaribe? 
• China-Latin America Finance Database
• Mercosur: South America's Fractious Trade Bloc

Follow me on Twitter: @rasheedguo

Intro Music:
No le Pegue a la Negra by Joe Arroyo

Outro Music:
Ah Feeling To Party by Black Stalin 

Why did the Black Panthers get offered asylum in China?  Why did W.E.B Du Bois change his mind about Mao? In this episode I am speaking with Dr. Keisha Brown about Sino-Black Relations. Dr. Brown is an Assistant Professor at Tennessee State University. She is a historian and Asian studies scholar whose work examines the representations of blackness in Modern China.

Dr. Brown on Twitter: @DocKBrown85

Recommendations 

• Teaching China Through Black History
• “Blackness in Exile: W.E.B. Du Bois’ Role in the Formation of Representations of Blackness as Conceptualized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).” Phylon 53. 2 (Winter 2016): 20-33.
• “Keisha Brown” chapter in Trailblasian: Black Women Expats in East Asia Anthology.  T.K. McLennon, ed. (June 2014).
• Homegrown Podcast 
• NPR Code Switch Podcast
• Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan by Marvin Sterling 
• Afro Asia by Fred Ho & Bill Mullen (Editors)

Follow me on Twitter: @rasheedguo

Intro Music
Tadow by Masego + Fkj

Outro Music
暴风雨/ Storm by Higher Brothers 

In this episode I will be talking with Dr. Evan Ellis on the view from the U.S of China's security engagement with the Caribbean. We discussed China's role in UN Peacekeeping missions to Haiti; the commercial and strategic potential of China building a canal in Nicaragua to compete with the Panama Canal; the scenario space for China building military outposts in the Caribbean; and other topics. 

Dr. Ellis is a research professor of Latin American studies at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute and a Senior Associate at the Center of Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Also Dr. Ellis previously served on the U.S secretary of state’s Policy Planning Staff with responsibility for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Recommendations:

1. China's Advance in the Caribbean by Evan Ellis 
2. American Foreign Policy in the English-Speaking Caribbean: From the Eighteenth to Twenty-first Century by Samantha Chaitram 

Show Notes:

• Wang Jing: The man behind the Nicaragua canal project
• The Modern World-System by Immanuel Wallerstein 
• Do Latin American Waters Continue to Fall Prey to China's Fishing?
• Hutchinson Ports (in the Bahamas; Chinese operated)

Follow me on Twitter: @rasheedguo

Intro music:
Dreamin' - 53 Thieves

Outro Music
Mañana Sureña - Los Aguas Aguas 

In this episode I'll be chatting with Jeremy Goldkorn. Jeremy worked in China for 20 years as an editor and entrepreneur. He is Editor-in-Chief of SupChina, and co-founder of the Sinica Podcast.   We had a wide ranging conversation about wolf worrier diplomacy, CCP thinking, and how to do nuanced China watching.

Jeremy on Twitter: @goldkorn

Recommended Reading:

• A Fearful Asymmetry: COVID-19 and America's Information Deficit with China 
• 江时学：“战狼外交”是个伪命题
• An Ignored Canary in an Unknown Coal Mine: The Caribbean's Economic Engagement with China
• The 'Little Emperor Model' of Chinese Diplomacy 
• The New Tianxia: Rebuilding China’s Internal and External Order

Intro Music:
祝酒歌 by Kawa

Outro Music:
All Ah We by Peter Ram

Follow me on Twitter: @rasheedguo 

In this episode I'll be chatting with Ruben Gonzalez-Vicente. He is a Lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands and studies China's relations in Latin America and the Caribbean. We chat about Chinese loan making in the Caribbean (with a particular focus on Jamaica) and the implications of the Belt and Road Initiative 一带一路 (BRI) for Caribbean development. 

This is a theme that we will return to again in later episodes of the podcast and the discussion here sets a great foundation.

Ruben's Papers:

• Varieties of Capital and Predistribution: The Foundations of Chinese Infrastructural Investment in the Caribbean
• Make development great again? Accumulation regimes, spaces of sovereign exception and the elite development paradigm of China's Belt and Road Initiative
• Over Hills and Valleys Too: China's Belt and Road Initiative in the Caribbean

Ruben's Email: [email protected]

Intro Music:
Looking For China by Bunji Garlin

Outro Music:
Stage Gone Bad by Kes & Iwer George

Follow me on Twitter: @rasheedguo 

Cross-strait relations do feature in caribbean foreign policy given that the region has quite a high proportion of Taiwan allies. We cannot discuss China in the Caribbean without thinking seriously about Taiwan.

In this episode I'm having a chat with Lev Nachman, a PhD candidate at UC Irvine. His research focuses on the relationship between social movements and political parties, with a spcial regional interest in Taiwan and Hong Kong. We talk about the domestic politics of Taiwan.

Lev on Twitter: @lnachman32

Recommended Reading 

• How Liberal is Taiwan? Adultery, the Death Penalty and Marriage Equality by Dafydd Fell
• Once a Cold War Flashpoint, a Part of Taiwan Embraces China's Pull by Chris Horton
• 菜市场政治学 

Intro Music
Chronixx - Here Comes Trouble

Outro Music
眠脑： 一片漆黑的海

Follow me on Twitter: @rasheedguo 

In this episode i'll be talking with Eric Olander, co-founder of the fantastic China in Africa Project.

Caribbean policy makers often believe they have recreate the wheel when it comes to China policy. They don't realize that China has been actively engaged with Africa. And the experience of those African countries can be very instructive for the Caribbean. The two regions have many similarities from being former colonies, relatively undeveloped, and of course being majority black.

But the Caribbean is relatively unaware of African generally and even less so of Sino-African relations. In this episode I want to open the dialogue between the Caribbean and Africa as it relates to what we can learn about China policy. In the age of Zoom and Whatsapp there is no excuse for a policy maker in Kingston to be unaware of what China is doing in Kigali.

Intro Music
Masego & FKJ -  Tadow

Outro Music
Los Aguas Aguas - Mañana Sureña