ChinaTalk

This week on ChinaEconTalk, Jordan interviews Chris Miller, associate professor of international history at Tufts University and a specialist on Russian politics, economics, and foreign policy. Drawing on some of his recent publications, Miller discusses topics ranging from Sino-Soviet collaboration and competition to their respective economic and political reform programs in the 1970s and 80s. Miller concludes by exploring the significance of the collapse of the USSR in terms of the impression it made on Chinese officials, including Xi Jinping, and what this may suggest about the future of Chinese politics and the ongoing Sino-Russian relationship. As Xi himself is reported to have said during a closed-door meeting in 2012: “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? … Finally, all it took was one quiet word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party, and a great party was gone. In the end nobody was a real man, nobody came out to resist.”

What to listen for on this week’s ChinaEconTalk: 

34:17: On the Soviet origins of Deng’s Reform and Opening strategy: “There was a period of learning [by China] from the Soviet Union in the 1950s right after the revolution...Deng picked that back up to a certain extent in the late 1970s...the goal was to give space to private enterprises in the countryside and to give space to farmers to operate without central Party control...Deng saw this and said, ‘I wonder if we can try something like this at home in China, and we can use Lenin to justify it.’”

52:15: “The CCP interpretation, which is also the interpretation of many in Russia today, is that it’s plausible to have had a strong man reform the economy but keep the party and the state as they were, and in my research that just seems extraordinarily implausible…in some ways the Xi Jinping view is the ‘have your cake and eat it too’ version, and the reality is the history doesn’t support that counterfactual.”

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This week on ChinaEconTalk, Jordan speaks with Dongwoo Kim, a postgraduate research fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada who specializes in AI. Dongwoo discusses his research on the progress of AI development in Japan, Korea, and China, including the challenges faced by Chinese AI researchers overseas, and the need for greater tech literacy in general. What to listen for on this week’s ChinaEconTalk: 4:49: Misconceptions abound when it comes to AI, as do references to “Skynet” from the Terminator movies. “Strictly speaking, that’s not what we’re talking about,” Dongwoo says. “People have such a misunderstanding about this, and also the way in which we’re using AI now, it’s kind of subtle, right? It’s used by Google, it’s used by Facebook. If you don’t have the tech literacy, you’re not always going to be aware of it. So I think there’s a potential that if we don’t educate people about what AI really is and why this matters, we might get to a situation where people don’t really have a clear conception of what this AI thing is when it will be affecting so many aspects of their lives.”   32:36: On Chinese AI researchers in Canada: “[Problems are] not as overt as in the U.S. I think, if anything, the concerns that have materialized are if there’s funding within a Canadian postsecondary institution that is tied to an American partner, that may compromise their ability to continue working on that research project for a researcher of Chinese ethnicity. But there has been no concrete move to do that in Canada.” Get bonus content on Patreon

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This week, Jordan speaks with Graham Webster, a China digital economy fellow and coordinating editor of the DigiChina project at New America. He was previously a senior fellow and lecturer at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. The two talked about Graham’s work at DigiChina, artificial intelligence in China and its complex legal infrastructure, the facts (and fiction) behind China’s controversial social credit system, and the potential for a new cold war between the U.S. and China. What to listen for on this week’s ChinaEconTalk: 10:23: “If the Chinese government wants to step on Huawei or somebody to get access to data, they’re not going to need this particular provision of law to do it. I think it’s a similar case with VPNs and these cross-border data rules. The pretty clear intent behind these rules is to expand on an increasingly detailed regime for protecting Chinese peoples’ data from abuse by companies or cyber criminals or just breaches due to bad security practices. It could be read in a way that would make VPNs problematic, but there are already other sets of regulations that make VPNs kind of problematic under Chinese law… From my perspective, this would be a very strange way for the Chinese government to try to cut down on VPNs, when they could just go at it directly and say it’s a violation of the principle of cybersovereignty.”  32:59: “In the end, we’re having this global discussion and people around the world are realizing how unaccountable various institutions and businesses are when they use automation. And there’s both real things going on in China, especially in Xinjiang, and a bunch of maybe slightly exaggerated or imagined things going on that capture people's imaginations about what could go wrong… I really would like it for people to be better informed about the realities of, for example, social credit because — my [former] colleague Jeremy Daum likes to say sometimes: ‘There are plenty of actual Chinese government offenses against human rights and against the dignity and well-being of Chinese citizens; we don’t need to invent other ones. We should focus on what’s actually happening.’” Get bonus content on Patreon

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This week, in part 2 of a special two-part edition of ChinaEconTalk, Jordan interviews Professor Julia Lovell, author of the recently published book on Mao’s international legacy entitled Maoism: A Global History. In this episode, Lovell recounts the ways in which Maoism truly started going global in the 1950s and 1960s. With some prompting courtesy of the Chinese government’s propaganda machine, self-described Maoist groups sprang up in Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Western Europe, and even the U.S. Lovell explains how groups around the world interpreted the works and words of Mao in various ways and with varying results — from Black Panthers hosting study sessions of Mao’s Little Red Book in the U.S. to members of the Shining Path who espoused a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology as they committed acts of guerilla warfare in Peru. Sign up here for the ChinaEconTalk newsletter.  Learn more about CLI here and use the promo code 'jordan' for $100 off any program. Quotes to listen for on this week’s episode: 21:19: Lovell describes the “counterculture craze” of the 1960s in Western Europe and the U.S., and the appeal of Maoism to such groups. “Student protestors, for example, who were dissatisfied with their universities and with their governments identified — or misidentified — Mao’s Cultural Revolution as a youth protest, and adopted its slogans such as ‘To rebel is justified’ (造反有理 zàofǎn yǒulǐ) or ‘Bombard the headquarters’ (炮打司令部 pàodǎ sīlìngbù) in their own revolts and demonstrations… Many Western radicals felt solidarity with Mao’s China, which was America’s number one detractor through this time. And this really followed the logic of ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend.’” 34:13: Lovell tells the story of one of Mao Zedong’s generals, operating under the pseudonym of Mafaxian, who was sent to Zambia in an effort to recruit and indoctrinate lieutenants loyal to the political and militaristic precepts of Maoism. His mission was ultimately a failure, with Mafaxian feeling “embittered” toward the end of his years-long tenure. Lovell explains how this oral history is a “perfect grassroots example of how limited the possibilities of China’s ability to export its model were, despite the huge amounts of generosity and largesse.” Get bonus content on Patreon

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This week, in part 1 of a special two-part edition of ChinaEconTalk, Jordan interviews Professor Julia Lovell, author of the recently published book on Mao’s international legacy entitled Maoism: A Global History. In this episode, Lovell introduces the core tenets of Maoist thought and its complex impact on both the Chinese Communist Party and other, offshoot devotees around the world. She outlines the key events in Mao’s life, the events that helped shaped his ideology, his idea of “violent, tumultuous world revolution,” and the friction during the Cold War that eventually culminated in the Sino-Soviet split. Sign up here for the ChinaEconTalk newsletter.  Learn more about CLI here and use the promo code 'jordan' for $100 off any program. Quotes to listen for in this episode: 15:10: “Maoism, although it has this singular name, it doesn’t actually correspond to a single, unitary phenomenon...it’s a set of ideas and practices that is living and breathing that has been translated and mistranslated across different decades and across many different regions. And above all, it’s a set of often very contradictory ideas. And this is no coincidence because Mao himself was a great admirer of the idea of contradiction. He saw contradictions as possessing a kind of primal energy. He saw them as something that drove history on. So when there were contradictions in his own ideas or when he perceived them around him, he tended to embrace them. Inconsistency didn’t bother him.” 43:48: “The intellectual, political nub of it is that Mao feels that after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev is losing the Soviet Union, losing their revolutionary bite. They’re making nice with the United States and they’re turning their backs on the idea of a violent, tumultuous world revolution.” 46:03: “Throughout his career and particularly toward the end of his life, he consistently saw himself as a rebel, as an outlier, as someone who made trouble. You see this very strongly in the Cultural Revolution, but you also see this in the way he tries and often succeeds to provoke the Soviets.” Get bonus content on Patreon

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While it may be a pipe dream for ChinaEconTalk to ever merit a billion-dollar price tag, in China, podcast “unicorns” are everywhere. Companies like Ximalaya and Yudao have multibillion-dollar valuations, but feature startlingly different content from what consumers expect in the West. What drives these differences, and what does the future hold for spoken audio in China? To answer these questions, Yi Yang, a young podcast host and founder of the Mandarin-language podcast startup JustPod 播客一下, joins Jordan to explain how, after the advent of podcasts in China, people are finally “learning to listen.” Yi Yang's original podcast is called LeftRight 忽左忽右. His two branded podcasts are Startup Insider 创业内幕 and Bessie’s Notes 贝望录. ChinaEconTalk's newsletter is dope. Sign up here at www.chinaecontalk.substack.com. The latest issues include an analysis of why Amazon lost in China and learn about the bane of China’s automobile industry. Get bonus content on Patreon

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While it may be a pipe dream for ChinaEconTalk to ever merit a billion-dollar price tag, in China, podcast “unicorns” are everywhere. Companies like Ximalaya and Yudao have multibillion-dollar valuations, but feature startlingly different content from what consumers expect in the West. What drives these differences, and what does the future hold for spoken audio in China? To answer these questions, Yi Yang, a young podcast host and founder of the Mandarin-language podcast startup JustPod 播客一下, j

This week on ChinaEconTalk, Jordan speaks with Donald Clarke, a specialist in Chinese law and the David Weaver Research Professor at George Washington University. Following a thorough introduction to the structure of the Chinese legal system starting from the Qing dynasty, Clarke discusses a provocative article he recently co-authored, Who owns Huawei?, which discusses in detail the legal ownership of Huawei Technology Co., Ltd. Clarke also deconstructs Huawei’s own legal arguments regarding whether its products (and, by extension, customers’ data) is subject to the Cybersecurity Law of the PRC and the National Intelligence Law of the PRC. Get bonus content on Patreon

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This week, in the second installment of the series “The Future of U.S.-China Relations” on ChinaEconTalk, Jordan speaks with Professor Hal Brands of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Zack Cooper, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In addition to offering some prescriptions for relieving some of the tension points in the U.S.-China relationship more generally, the pair discuss the major takeaways from their co-published paper in the Texas National Security Review, “After Responsible Stakeholder, What? Debating America’s China Policy.” Get bonus content on Patreon

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This week on ChinaEconTalk, Jordan speaks with veteran journalist Peter Hessler. Peter spent seven years in China as a correspondent for The New Yorker, followed by five years in Egypt. In this episode, Peter discusses his long and prolific career reporting on the society, politics, and culture of these two dynamic nations; he also considers the similarities and differences in the ways the Chinese and Egyptian people make sense of their respective places in the world based on their rich historical and cultural legacies. In addition, Peter reflects on the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and contrasts it with the 2013 mass protests and eventual coup d'état in Cairo. Check out the ChinaEconTalk newsletter here, and please leave us a review on iTunes! Get bonus content on Patreon

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