Chinese Whispers

By The Spectator

What's Chinese Whispers about?

A fortnightly podcast from the Spectator on the latest in Chinese politics, society, and more. From Huawei to Hong Kong, Cindy Yu talks to experts, journalists, and long time China-watchers on what you need to know about China.

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Chinese Whispers episodes:

04.15.2024
Was Marco Polo a 'sexpat'?
When I recently came across a book review asking the question ‘was Marco Polo a "sexpat"?’, I knew I had to get its author on to, well, discuss this important question some more. The 13th century Venetian merchant Marco Polo’s...
03.28.2024
What Chinese hackers want
Over the last week the UK has been rocked by allegations that China was responsible for two cyber attacks in recent years – one on the Electoral Commission, where hackers successfully accessed the open register, which has the details of...
03.18.2024
Life on the margins pt II: Li Ziqi and the phenomenon of the rural influencer
In the last episode, I discussed Chinese rural lives with Professor Scott Rozelle. One point he made which particularly stuck with me was the dying out of farming as an occuption – he'd said that most rural people under the...
03.04.2024
Life on the margins: how China's rural deprivation curbs its success
Too often our stories about China are dictated by the urban experience, probably because journalists inside and outside of China are often based in the big cities; Beijing specifically. Those who live in the cities also tend to be more...
02.19.2024
What the Messi row reveals about Chinese football
The Argentinian football star Lionel Messi has been trending on Weibo – and unfortunately, not for a good reason. It all started when Messi sat out a match in Hong Kong earlier this month. His reason – that he was...
02.05.2024
Why do people join the CCP?
At last count, the Chinese Communist Party has 98 million members, more people than the population of Germany. Its membership also continues to grow, making it one of the most successful and resilient political parties of the last a hundred...
01.22.2024
Was China's economic boom 'made in America'?
Today, the US and China are at loggerheads. There’s renewed talk of a Cold War as Washington finds various ways to cut China out of key supply chains and to block China’s economic development in areas like semiconductors and renewables. There’s...
01.08.2024
What lies at the root of the India-China rivalry?
India is the fifth largest economy in the world, and now has a population larger than China’s. It’s no surprise, then, that officials in Washington often see India as a powerful non-western bulwark to growing Chinese power. On this podcast,...
12.11.2023
Who will be Taiwan's next President?
Taiwan goes to the polls in just over a month. This is an election that could have wide repercussions, given the island’s status as a potential flashpoint in the coming years. The incumbent President, Tsai Ing-wen, is coming to the end...
11.28.2023
Dialect and identity: is Mandarin bad for China?
Across the span of China, a country as big as Europe, there are countless regional dialects and accents – perhaps even languages. Often, they're mutually unintelligible. The Chinese call these ‘fangyan’, and each Chinese person will likely be able to speak...
11.13.2023
Battling the official narrative – China's 'underground historians'
Controlling history is key to the Chinese Communist Party’s control of the country. Whether it’s playing up the ‘century of humiliation’, or whitewashing past mistakes like the Great Leap Forward or the Tiananmen Protests, the Party expends huge effort and...
10.30.2023
Rethinking Chinese food with Fuchsia Dunlop
All cultures care about their cuisine, but the Chinese must have one of the most food-obsessed cultures in the world. It may be because we have the best food... Those listeners of Chinese Whispers who’ve been to China will know exactly...
10.16.2023
'The mask has slipped' – Tuvia Gering on China, Israel and Hamas
When China brokered a historic detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran earlier this year, it seemed that a new phase in world history – and certainly in Chinese foreign policy – had opened up. Instead of the US being a...
10.02.2023
Does China care what Britain thinks?
In 2010, David Cameron and George Osborne ushered in what they called ‘a golden era’ with China, the world’s rising superpower. They argued that Britain could be China’s best friend in the West. Thirteen years later, after a global pandemic,...
09.18.2023
What we know about Beijing's spies
Two years ago, Richard Moore, head of MI6, said that China was now the organisation’s ‘single greatest priority’. Parliamentarians and the British public have been starkly reminded of this by last week’s news that a parliamentary researcher had been arrested on...
09.04.2023
Is China still a Confucian country?
For thousands of years, Confucianism has run through the fabric of Chinese society, politics and culture. Decades of Communism has taken its toll on China, so can it still be considered a Confucian country? Joining the episode is one of the...
08.21.2023
What Beidaihe reveals about the changing nature of Communist leadership
178 miles to the east of Beijing, there’s a beach resort called Beidaihe. The water is shallow and the sand is yellow and fine. Luxurious holiday villas dot the coastline. Starting from the 1950s, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party...
08.07.2023
Does China need a new economic playbook?
At the end of last year, some thought that the Chinese economic recovery after three years of zero Covid could happen just as fast as zero Covid itself ended being government policy. I admit, that included me. And yet, more than...
07.24.2023
Did some good come from the Qing’s dying century?
In the 1800s, Qing China’s final century, European powers were expanding eastwards. The industrialised West, with its gunboats and muskets, and the soft power of Christianity, pushed around the dynasty’s last rulers. But was this period more than just a time...
06.30.2023
Beijing and Prigozhin: what does China think of the Wagner uprising?
It’s now a week since the Wagner Group revolted against the Kremlin. Though the dramatic uprising was quelled within 24 hours and the group’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is now exiled to Belarus, the episode will have lasting impact on President Putin’s...
06.19.2023
How divided is Europe on China?
The word ‘West’ is often used as a shorthand to describe liberal democracies in Europe, and perhaps in Asia too, such that we’ll often talk about ‘the West’s attitude to China’, or the ‘West’s relations with China’. But this is...
06.05.2023
Why China won't invade Taiwan
In much of the conversation surrounding China and Taiwan, the question of invasion seems to be a ‘when’ not an ‘if’. But is an invasion really so inevitable? No one knows for sure, of course, but there are good reasons to...
05.15.2023
How China's mail-order brides are taking back control
The mail-order bride industry is booming – but today's international dating doesn't look as it used to. It turns out that it’s not so much young and uneducated Chinese women looking to marry out of the country anymore, and more middle...
05.01.2023
Young and jobless: Is the government letting down China's Generation Z?
Hidden in March’s GDP figures was a shocking statistic – a fifth of Chinese 16 to 24 year olds are out of work. This is a near record high, and the economic background to a fresh wave of disillusionment among...
04.17.2023
Japan's role in the making of modern China
Just before Christmas, it was reported that the billionaire Jack Ma had moved to Tokyo after getting into trouble with the Chinese authorities. If he's still living there, he'd be one of several well known Chinese who seems to have...
04.03.2023
Hollywood and China: happily ever after?
Until a few years ago, Hollywood dominated Chinese cinemas. In the People’s Republic, Marvel’s superhero romps were the people’s favourite, with Avengers: Endgame taking in over £510 million at Chinese box offices. Hollywood is desperate to crack the Chinese market –...
03.20.2023
What Beijing wants out of the Russian invasion
As Xi Jinping visits Vladimir Putin in Russia this week, this episode of Chinese Whispers is returning to one of the missions of this podcast series – to look at things as the Chinese see them. My guest today is Zhou...
03.06.2023
Spy planes and infiltrators: a history of the CIA in China
The Chinese Communist Party likes to blame its domestic political problems on foreign interference, and it has done so since the days of Chairman Mao. But sometimes, does this paranoia, this narrative, have a point? Or at least during the depths...
02.20.2023
Tiananmen and the Tang: the rise of rock in China
Every protest needs an anthem, and for the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, 'Nothing to My Name' by Cui Jian became that emblem. Cui was one of China's earliest rockers, taking inspiration from the peasant music of China's northwest and fusing...
02.06.2023
Have Xinjiang's camps been closed?
A few months ago, an intriguing article in the Washington Post shed light on the latest situation Xinjiang, the western region of China where the Uighur minority live. The two journalists, Eva Dou and Cate Cadell, saw on their travels...
01.23.2023
Covid's legacy: how will China remember the pandemic?
Three years ago, as people across China welcomed the Year of the Rat, a new virus was taking hold in Wuhan. In London, the conversation at my family’s New Year dinner was dominated by the latest updates, how many masks...
01.09.2023
Should Britain's Confucius Institutes be shut down?
Should Confucius Institutes be shut down? There are hundreds of these centres across six continents, funded by the Ministry of Education, with the stated goal of public education on and cultural promotion of China. They offer classes on language, history...
12.12.2022
Strangers in a strange land: being foreign in China
Over the last few hundred years, China has had a difficult and complicated relationship with foreigners. On the one hand, they added to the country’s intellectual richness by introducing western philosophy and science; and on the other, these contributions often...
11.29.2022
Echoes of 1989: where the protests go next
Comparisons with 1989’s Tiananmen Square protests are too often evoked when it comes to talking about civil disobedience in China. Even so, this weekend’s protests have been historic. It’s the first time since the zero Covid policy started that people...
11.14.2022
Second class citizens: the lives of China's internal migrants
When the city of Zhengzhou, home to the world’s largest iPhone factory, locked down recently, some of its factory workers had nowhere to go. Hoping to escape Covid restrictions, many of them walked miles along motorways to their hometowns, their...
10.28.2022
Reflections on the 20th Party Congress: how Xi took complete control
This week Xi Jinping has taken his new Politburo Standing Committee on a group trip – to Yan’An, the base of Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution after the Long March. The symbolism is easy to see. On this episode of Chinese Whispers,...
10.17.2022
Censorship and sexuality: being gay in China
I recently caught a rare viewing of a 2001 Chinese film, Lan Yu. It tells the story of two gay men falling in love and finding domestic life throughout the reform and opening years of China. The filmmakers never bothered...
10.03.2022
Succession and power: a look ahead to the 20th Party Congress
Every five years, Beijing goes into heightened security as senior members of the Chinese Communist Party gather. The National Party Congress is an occasion for the party to review its track record and determine its future direction, but most crucially,...
09.20.2022
History and belonging: life in a Chinese mega-city
In the last four decades, hundreds of millions of Chinese have moved into cities. Today, two thirds of the country live in urban areas (compared to just one third in 1985), and many of these are hubs with tens of...
09.05.2022
Will Liz Truss declare a genocide in Xinjiang?
After a long summer of hustings, Liz Truss has finally been confirmed today as the next leader of the Conservative party. As she gets the keys to Downing Street, she'll finally be able to carry out her vision of Sino-British...
08.22.2022
The new great game: how China replaced Russia in Kazakhstan and beyond
What does China want with Xinjiang? Its systematic repression of the Uyghur people and other regional minorities has shocked the world, eliciting accusations of genocide from politicians and activists across the West. The Chinese Communist Party claims that its re-education...
08.05.2022
Pelosi's swansong: the Taiwanese view on her fleeting visit
Nancy Pelosi’s controversial trip to Taiwan made headlines across the world this week, after President Xi’s warnings to the US ‘not to play with fire’. Furious, Beijing has responded with economic sanctions and a flurry of missiles over and around...
07.25.2022
Is China's property market about to go bust?
China’s property market accounts for something between 20 and 29 per cent of the country’s total GDP. The seemingly never-ending rise of residential blocks were how ordinary people like my family could see and touch China’s miraculous economic growth. Home...
07.11.2022
Semiconductors: the next technological arms race
Semiconductors are the most important thing that you've never heard of. These little computer chips provide the processing power for everything from cars and iPhones, to unmanned drones and missiles. In Beijing's Made in China 2025 industrial strategy, through which...
06.27.2022
The radical age of Chinese cinema
You probably wouldn’t expect to see the Cultural Revolution in Chinese films, or the Great Leap Forward, or the Tiananmen Square protests. But for a certain generation and a certain corner of the Chinese film industry, these were actually common...
06.13.2022
Mythbusting the social credit system
China's social credit system is notorious. This Black Mirror-esque network supposedly gives citizens a score, based on an opaque algorithm that feeds on data from each person's digital and physical lives. With one billion Chinese accessing the Internet and the...
05.30.2022
How the Cultural Revolution shaped China's leaders today
All eyes are on the Communist leadership this year, as the months count down to autumn’s National Party Congress, where Xi Jinping may be crowned for a third term. But how much do we really know about the Party’s leadership?...
05.16.2022
How powerful is the People's Liberation Army?
It’s clear now that Vladimir Putin didn’t expect his army to perform quite so badly when invading Ukraine. As much as that is celebrated in much of the world, it will be a cause for concern – or at least...
05.02.2022
Does China want to change the international rules-based order?
China is often accused of breaking international rules and norms. Just last week at Mansion House, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said: 'Countries must play by the rules. And that includes China'. So what are its transgressions, and what are its goals...
04.18.2022
Algorithms and lockdowns: how China's gig economy works
‘One Shanghai courier uses own 70,000 yuan to buy necessities for people’, one Weibo hashtag trended last week. Instead of being seen as a damning indictment on what the state’s strict lockdown has induced people to do, the courier was...

What's Chinese Whispers about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Chinese Whispers episodes:

Was Marco Polo a 'sexpat'?

What Chinese hackers want

Life on the margins pt II: Li Ziqi and the phenomenon of the rural influencer

Life on the margins: how China's rural deprivation curbs its success

What the Messi row reveals about Chinese football

Why do people join the CCP?

Was China's economic boom 'made in America'?

What lies at the root of the India-China rivalry?

Who will be Taiwan's next President?

Dialect and identity: is Mandarin bad for China?

Battling the official narrative – China's 'underground historians'

Rethinking Chinese food with Fuchsia Dunlop

'The mask has slipped' – Tuvia Gering on China, Israel and Hamas

Does China care what Britain thinks?

What we know about Beijing's spies

Is China still a Confucian country?

What Beidaihe reveals about the changing nature of Communist leadership

Does China need a new economic playbook?

Did some good come from the Qing’s dying century?

Beijing and Prigozhin: what does China think of the Wagner uprising?

How divided is Europe on China?

Why China won't invade Taiwan

How China's mail-order brides are taking back control

Young and jobless: Is the government letting down China's Generation Z?

Japan's role in the making of modern China

Hollywood and China: happily ever after?

What Beijing wants out of the Russian invasion

Spy planes and infiltrators: a history of the CIA in China

Tiananmen and the Tang: the rise of rock in China

Have Xinjiang's camps been closed?

Covid's legacy: how will China remember the pandemic?

Should Britain's Confucius Institutes be shut down?

Strangers in a strange land: being foreign in China

Echoes of 1989: where the protests go next

Second class citizens: the lives of China's internal migrants

Reflections on the 20th Party Congress: how Xi took complete control

Censorship and sexuality: being gay in China

Succession and power: a look ahead to the 20th Party Congress

History and belonging: life in a Chinese mega-city

Will Liz Truss declare a genocide in Xinjiang?

The new great game: how China replaced Russia in Kazakhstan and beyond

Pelosi's swansong: the Taiwanese view on her fleeting visit

Is China's property market about to go bust?

Semiconductors: the next technological arms race

The radical age of Chinese cinema

Mythbusting the social credit system

How the Cultural Revolution shaped China's leaders today

How powerful is the People's Liberation Army?

Does China want to change the international rules-based order?

Algorithms and lockdowns: how China's gig economy works